Third Place

Inspiration

The third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (first place) and the workplace (second place). As college students, we’ve noticed a significant shift in our social lives when entering our new communities; from quickly messaging a friend to study at a library, walking to a nearby free museum, or eating at a trendy cafe, the importance of community has been more profound than ever. Unfortunately, not everyone has the privilege of walkable cities or tight communities. That is why we created Third Place, an app that connects people to community events, catered to the user’s location, preferences, and hobbies. In addition, social events tend to be posted on social media or through an email newsletter. For many people, it is difficult to keep track of these events when they are scattered over different media platforms. Third Place serves as a hub for events in your community!

What it does

Third Place promotes community engagement by offering users a platform to discover, share, and attend free events and third places within their local area. Users can create profiles, filter events based on interests, and receive location-based recommendations to enter different worlds. Third Place aims to foster connections, support local communities, and enhance the social fabric of neighborhoods through accessible and engaging experiences.

How we built it

Our team primarily worked with Figma simultaneously to develop our app. For laying out our ideas and brainstorming, we used a google document to effectively collaborate!

Challenges we ran into

Two out of our four members have very little coding/design experience, but we were able to overcome that hurdle by having our more experienced members guide us along the way. In addition, it took a lot of research and inspecting popular websites to realize which of our features were not user friendly. For example, far into development, we realized that we did not have a log out button. In addition, we dedicated a lot of time focusing on the user experience of the user instead of the creator, so we had to quickly create those pages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Designing our first app!
• Collaborating with our group members
• Solving problems by working and communicating together
• Dedicating our time and hard work into this project

What we learned

• UX design
• Figma
• Reaching out and asking questions to each other, SWE officers, Shade employees, and other attendees at the hackathon will allow us to quickly solve issues that we are stuck on. Knowledge is power!
• Sitting on a chair for 12 hours hurts your back.

What's next for Third Place

We want to interview users to gain knowledge on how we can improve our UI. We would like to create the website using HTML and CSS, implement the back-end of the project, and make a database where we can actually create and manage accounts and events.

Built With

• figma