Inspiration
Incredibly large amounts of clothing and other products go to waste each year. Textiles generate greenhouse gasses, specifically, methane, and infect our groundwater and soil with toxic chemicals and dyes. By promoting upcycling, we hope to spread the idea of using creativity and innovation to reuse and recycle. On an environmental scale, upcycling can help save materials from going into landfill and minimize the use of natural resources, which is limited. Additionally, upcycling is also substantially helpful in reducing manufacturing costs as designers are able to make products with reclaimed materials. This can also socially and economically benefit local and rural businesses and industry.
What it does
The Upcycle Project is a creative network to showcase and discover creative works. Users are able to illustrate the before and afters of their upcycling projects and increase their status on a leaderboard through a point system. Every project is equivalent to 5 points added to a user's score! Through the leaderboard, users can see the top upcyclers within our community. Those who have earned the most points today, as well as the users with the most points this month, will be available to view. At the end of each month, the 3 users who have earned the most points during that month will be rewarded with a $25 gift card to Michael's, allowing them to replenish supplies to continue upcycling! By motivating users using rewards, The Upcycle Project hopes to promote fashion-based sustainability through upcycling!
How we built it
To code the website, we began by creating a home page, as well as profile, login, register, discover, and leaderboard pages with a navigation bar that linked all the pages together. From there, we worked as a team on creating and formatting each individual page using a mixture of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Afterward, we worked on linking specific pages together and created thank you pages after each submission page as well. For example, we linked the login and register pages together and created a thank you page that redirects the user to the login page after registering. Finally, we added finishing creative touches and uploaded it to the web using a GitHub repository.
Challenges we ran into
Initially, we planned to incorporate a database to store user data and allow repeat login as well as user identification within our website. However, given the time constraints and our inexperience with creating a database, we decided to focus on aspects of the project we knew we could complete. Additionally, we also planned to lock the Profile page of our website so that it was only accessible after login. We managed to get this done in a sense using HTML buttons and Javascript, but the functionality is not exactly what we wanted it to be.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a group, we worked together to create solutions to problems that none of us would have thought of otherwise. We are very proud of the fact that at the end of the day, we have a final product that we can say works for the intended purpose.
What we learned
Before creating this project, three out of the four members had never or barely used HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The creation of this project was a process that taught all of us different things, whether it be how to code a website or how to make something new using the aforementioned languages. We learned how to incorporate Javascript to make the website flow smoothly and we also learned how to use CSS for intricate design.
What's next for The Upcycle Project
We would like to continue working on the back end of our project, particularly with adding a database feature that allows user input to be stored. We would also like to make the website more user-friendly and fix some of the coding errors we ran into, such as with the buttons.
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