Sustainable Living Companion

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Inspiration

Our group saw the opportunity to promote sustainable lifestyles and to help individuals change their decision-making towards the choice of sustainable options at a daily level. Our own engagement and discussions about climate change impacts and individuals personal effects on their carbon footprints motivated us to create a tool to increase sustainability that is readily available, and actionable for all people. Thus, we created a product that involves a platform for learning, as well as a tool for creating community, gamification around sustainability and sustainability actions, and immediate feedback.

What it does

"Grow With Me" is a mobile-first web app intended to help users implement sustainable lifestyle habits. The app contains a variety of interactive tools and resources that will enable users to follow their potential environmental impact, information about green living, and connect with others working towards a similar end. Some notable features of the service include: Carbon Footprint Calculator: Users enter information about their lifestyle and are provided with an estimated carbon footprint as well as receive tailored suggestions for reducing it. Energy & Water Usage Tracking: Users can record and keep track of their utility usage so they can obtain more insight about their potential savings while conserving resources. Local Resources Map: The app has an integrated map to locate local recycling ,community gardens, and eco-friendly businesses to help users locate sustainable options more easily. Community Challenges and Gamification: Users can take part in sustainability challenges, earn badges and compete on leaderboards which will help motivate and provide a sense of community. Educational Content: The app can provide articles, videos, and tips on climate change, reducing waste, renewable energy, etc. to keep the user informed and motivated. User Profile & Goals: Users can set their own personal sustainability goals, track progress, and celebrate milestones, in turn solidifying their sustainable practices.

How we built it

We created the “Grow With Me” sustainable living platform using Bolt.new, and took advantage of its development environment through a no-code, prompt-driven concept design space. We began by defining our core features, which included a carbon footprint calculator, personalized tips, tracking energy and water usage, mapping local resources, pitting the community against each other to serve their communities, and educational modules and content. We were able to prompt with natural language and produce front end UI components, back end functionality, and services from others such as Supabase for authentication and data collection. We were able to share links to the project to facilitate collaboration and to export progress to share with a GitHub repo that documented everyone’s activity and permitted each member of our project integration team to contribute and review updates.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult piece was ensuring smooth collaboration and managing access to Bolt.new. The tokens on Bolt.new were limited, and teams of developers had to share responses and project links. It would almost certainly be the case that collaborators expect consistency between Bolt.new and our GitHub repo. While code is not generally designed, and codebases are not "in-sync," we were still challenged by having to manually export when we added to our Bolt.new repository. We also had challenges with customizing the UI to achieve our design objectives and to securely integrate third-party services. Nonetheless, the iterative process and open discussions that we had with our team, allowed us to tackle several issues and provide a working, easy to use platform.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Delivering a User-Friendly, Engaging Platform: We developed a comprehensive app that allows daily sustainable living to become accessible and fun for a wide audience. Integrating Multiple Elements Seamlessly: Our team was able to integrate a carbon footprint calculator, resource mapping, community challenges, and educational content into a smooth, user-friendly experience. Collaboration Despite Limitations: Our team remained collaborative despite limitations on tokens and manually exporting all our cards via Bolt.new, as it was possible to use GitHub, where all team members could provide input and review changes. Empowering Users to Enact Change: By providing actions and engaging the audience in a community, we delivered a platform that allowed individuals to diminish their harm on the planet and promote further action. Navigating the Technicalities: We maintained flexibility and adaptability as we navigated the numerous challenges of backend integration, UI customizations, and syncing the progress of the project. Positive Responses and Engagement: Early user testing and feedback demonstrated that we successfully built an app that gives everyday users agency to develop sustainable habits and build a community around environmental stewardship.

What we learned

During the design journey, we learned a lot about user experience design, the need for clear and actionable data visualization, and the various nuances associated when integrating backend services with a modern frontend. We learned just how powerful it can be when you bring together a community to collaborate via no-code or low-code tools, like Bolt.new, and what looked like best practices in order to share projects effectively using GitHub. Moreover, this experience enhanced our understanding of sustainability metrics, such as calculating carbon footprints and tracking energy use.

What's next for Sustainable Living Companion

Integration with Smart Home & IoT Devices We will integrate smart home and IoT devices into the platform that empower our application users to monitor and maximize their usage (energy and water) in real-time. For example, users could connect their application to smart thermostats, lighting, or solar panels to provide actionable insight and automatically sustain their environmentally-friendly practices.
Enhanced AI and Personalization Using artificial intelligence, we will begin to create greater context-specific actions to encourage sustainable behaviours with different users. AI could help to track and understand user activity, recommend the most sustainable actions, recommend the best time of day to use energy, or give recommendations on specific sustainability actions to encourage positive user habits.
Blockchain for Transparency and Rewards We will explore the use of blockchain and cryptocurrencies into our application as part of the community engagement strategy to build trust and reward sustainable actions. For instance, we could track users' carbon savings and/or provide badges and/or tokens to users after each contribution they make to living sustainably which could be used for discounts or credits in the community.
Expanding Community Features We will continue enhancing the application’s community platform with greater community features by adding more interactive challenges, and forums, and events within the local sustainability community to build stronger relationships. Overall, we would like to encourage our users to actively participate in building a local community of sustainability to share tips, celebrate successes, and build inspiration.
Advanced Analytics and Impact Reports We will develop advanced analytics to provide users with detailed reports of their sustainability journey including carbon footprint reductions, energy savings, and waste diversion. Having access to this information will allow user's to visualize their progress and form new targets.