Problem Statement

Climate change and environmental health are highly discussed topics in today’s society. Immediate change is called for to prevent irreversible damage. These changes start at the individuals level, unfortunately, they lack sufficient incentivization and immediate personal impactful gratification. As a result, individuals, especially college students don’t often feel encouraged enough to participate.

Research

First, we interviewed students of diverse demographic and campus community membership to have a fuller understanding of the problem. We’ve gathered insights that suggest students belonging in large communities like fraternity and sorority with built-in community service focused events are more likely to participate. These individuals only have to engage in pre-planned events rather than doing the legwork of planning themselves, making it an enjoyable and and simple task. Students in fraternities and sororities are also more likely to participate since they have mutual friends to engage with. 

Another insight we gathered from our research is while students indeed want to participate, there often lacks a centralized or direct resource to locate relevant and impactful opportunities. While the current few websites or event pages exist, they are scattered around and do not provide a centralized and consolidated hub for opportunities. Additionally, these resources are difficult to find and are not intuitive. 

These elements all boil down to the idea of incentives that encourage them to participate more than their counterparts. In today’s fast-paced world, we crave incentives or motivation to complete tasks. The present community service opportunity systems do not promote and appeal to this mentality. The current systems foster a feel-good gratification, however there’s often no tangible reward or incentive for completion. Therefore, this provides a great opportunity to design something incentive-based that focuses on incentivizing users to participate in community service with physical rewards while also connecting them with a community to encourage retention.

Solution

Our solution for the problem is a mobile application that focuses on promoting engagement in community service through the act of tree planting while also infusing educational information about the environment throughout. We want to create a service that not only creates personal connection between the user and the product of their labor, but also to equip users with the quantifiable knowledge of the impact resulted from their action to encourage retention. This application is aimed to not only encourage the planting of trees by fostering an emotional connection with their product, but also to build a community with like minded individuals.

Flow Diagram

Low Fidelity