Inspiration
According to the United Nations World Water Development Report of 2018 agricultural and industrial sectors accounted for approximately 90% of direct water withdrawals. Globally, water consumption poses negative climate effects for all communities, and many corporations are doing little to compensate for this damage.
Our team recognized this issue, and through our previous experiences within the environmental and research fields realized that we could help to spread awareness and educate others about this topic. Since this is a problem that affects many individuals, specifically through drought and heatwave, along with other climate crises, we found that this project could have the ability to make a positive impact on a large audience.
What it does
Rehydrate aims to educate all populations on corporate water consumption and conservation efforts. Through an engaging website, users take away a fresh perspective on our current water crisis and other climate impacts, water-related statistics, and ways that they can make a difference.
How we built it
We built Rehydrate’s website on Qoom. Our team used Canva to create graphics, our presentation, and for video editing. Adobe Illustrator and Premiere Pro were used for developing initial brainstorm mockups, Rehydrate’s logo, creating GIFs. Our team also used Balsamiq Cloud to develop a foundation wireframe to visualize the layout of our site, as well as focus on user experience.
Challenges we ran into
Our team was eager to begin brainstorming, and we came up with many ideas, where we were able to visualize additional features and aspects for our project. One initial challenge we faced was selecting a main idea, out of the many that we brainstormed. Choosing a name for our project and honing in on tools that we wanted to use were other aspects that required some additional thought, considering that we were not very familiar with many of the tools we ended up using.
Additionally our team was spread across two time zones, and we worked to coordinate schedule wise, as well as face an unexpected disturbance of a power outage on Saturday evening for one of our teammates on the West Coast.
As we were researching to gather sources for our site, we found that different data sites limited public accessibility, which created the challenge of finding available sources on these topics.
Finally, since we were all beginners with the web development tool Qoom, there were challenges we faced in fully building our site out as much as we had planned to. We now have a future roadmap of areas that we hope to add to and expand for greater education efforts!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud that we created and stuck with a theme that we all enjoyed learning more about and working on together. We are also proud of our designs throughout our site, including our logo, and infographics as well as our presentation. Many of our graphics required additional iterations so it was nice to develop final versions we were all happy with.
At our beginner level using Qoom, we are proud of how far we got with the creation of a base website for Rehydrate. We are also excited for future plans that we could continue to adapt to expand the site and develop additional features.
Finally we are really proud of the new skills we gained this weekend, both through attending workshops, and the development of our project, as well as meeting new people and working together as a team.
What we learned
Our team learned many new skills, and further developed those that we had some previous experience with. Learning about Application Programming Interface (API) and how they are applied to many real world examples was an interesting topic that we learned more about.
We also gained familiarity with many tools such as Qoom for front-end website development; Framer, and Figma for UX design; and Balsamiq Cloud for wireframing.
Through our research component we collected statistics and sources to learn more about corporate water consumption and industry initiatives related to water conservation, which heightened our analytics skills.
During the workshops and while working on our project we also learned more about crafting our pitching and presentation skills. We further developed soft skills, such as collaboration and communication- especially while working with team members of different ages, and backgrounds living in different timezones.
Using new tools and platforms and furthering our UX, design, research, front end development skills and many more are all areas that we are proud to have gained experience with.
What's next for Rehydrate
Rehydrate’s plans for future development include further edits of our site using Qoom, publishing the five-question quiz we have developed content for. As well as working on the login/signup system, and fixing mobile responsiveness. Our team would also like to add shareable links to information that we have sourced and the infographics we developed.
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