Find below all of the progress from the Climate Change team project 👇
TASK: Choose a Zeitgeist topic to explore a product, service or system that may address the issue or part of the issue
As a team, we chose the topic of climate change. We are all very interested in climate change so it was the perfect topic for us.
We started off the project by thinking about problems around climate change and how it is affecting our local area. We wanted to develop something that would help the area we live in and so we started researching climate change issues in Northern Ireland. Searching up phrases like Waste pollution, air pollution and Climate change in Northern Ireland. Quite a few articles and news stories appeared around waste pollution and how waterways and streets have had the highest levels of waste ever recorded.
From this, we developed our Problem Statement. “The levels of rubbish/waste have reached record highs in NI; We must take appropriate action to motivate and make it easier for people to report waste and reduce pollution levels across the country.”
So we had found a real-life issue regarding climate change in our local area and now it was time to think about how it is impacting people's lives. As the 4 of us live in Belfast we had first-hand experience with this issue. All of us live in student areas where bins are either, not collected, neglected, or have been torn to pieces by animals such as seagulls. We used our knowledge to develop a possible user persona who is impacted by the waste situation in N.I.
We then ideated possible solutions to this problem and how we could help our user persona. After this, we explored the possible outcomes of our solutions.
After figuring out the problem and considering a few solutions we decided to do some quick competitive research into any existing or similar applications or products on waste disposal. We came across an application called “Clear waste” which is a UK-based app for waste disposal.
“The ClearWaste app makes it easy to report fly-tipping to the appropriate local authority anywhere in the UK – and it helps consumers get rid of their rubbish using government licensed waste removal companies, safe in the knowledge that it won't be fly-tipped and for the best possible price.”
A fly-tipping report can be created with images and submitted in around 60 seconds. Alerts go straight to councils who can then clear up the rubbish.
From a quick usability test on the app, it proved to be quite a long process to report waste with a total of 5 steps. In my opinion, the interface was too complex for such a simple task. We questioned the user’s motives to use the app when they are out as the process is so long. This got us thinking. Could we make an app that simplifies this process and automated it a little more?
After looking at Clean Waste, we then started to do some ideation into a possible solution for bringing down the levels of waste in NI with inspiration from our analysis.
We used mind maps to explore ideas and figure out the functionality of this idea. Come up with things like; visualise the vans driving around the district, take a photo and pin the location to make it easier for drivers, heat maps to show the most polluted areas etc.
