PROJECT 1 | mysite

Project 1: Sustainable Ad Campaign

Goal of this project

The goal of this project is to develop an interactive ad campaign targeting sustainability around campus. With our team of 6 people from diverse backgrounds, we started from analyzing different existing campaigns at UST, generalized Point-of-View of potential target users, brainstormed different ideas, narrowing down to the best solution, and ultimately building the final prototype.

Existing Campaigns

There are actually several existing environment campaigns already on campus. For example, there is the recycle bin that categories different types of trash (metal, plastic, or paper), automatic water dispenser, posters on the wall that motivate people to take the stairs instead of the lift, etc.

From the existing campaigns, we identified the key resources that are being consumed by people and produced a mindmap that is useful for brainstorming later.

Point-of-View

After coming up with the mindmap, we started to think of our target users in mind. Our representative user, could be for example, a local student studying CS who shows no interest toward sustainability and spends a lot of time on social media per day. Thus, we figured out we need to come up with something that will catch his attention and similar types of people.

Brainstorming and Storyboards

After figuring out our potential users and their personas, we went on to the brainstorming session. From the mindmap and the Point-of-View, we came up with four different ideas of sustainable ad campaigns:

- Trash "Doll Machine": Instead of using cash, recyclable trash items that users throw into the bin are now used as tokens to have a chance to play the doll machine to try and get the doll as reward.

- Digital Farm Game: An interactive, social mobile game in which players can grow their farm by saving resources, e.g. saving water increases the lake size, using less paper grows more trees, and consuming less rice makes the plant field more fertile. At the end of the month, there will be a sustainable index (rank) where players can compete for the sustainable title.

- Freezing Puppy: A virtual puppy on screen display beside the AC which will cry when the user leaves the AC on for too long or lowers the temperature. If user increases the temperature or turns the AC off for a while, the puppy will become happy again.

- The Real Less Rice: In the less-rice ordering selection of the food kiosks, users will need to swipe on the screen and an animation will be shown that removes some rice from your bowl and put into the hands of a poor child from a poor country.

Choosing the Right Idea

After drawing out the storyboards, we conducted speed dating with several students to gather opinions and feedbacks about each idea. From their claims, we concluded that the digital farm game is unfeasible since the game depends on a fully-comprehensive and complicated system to track everybody's carbon footprint; the freezing puppy might not attract guys as much as they attract girls; and the less rice visualization is simply just not interactive enough. Hence, we firmly decided to stick with our "doll machine" idea because of the positive feedback from the interviewees.

However, one of the feedback we got is that the "doll machine" takes too much time to play per trash thrown into the rubbish bin and there are questions like, "what if two trash items are thrown in at the same time, who gets to play?" Thus, we refined our idea into a "slot machine" similar to those in gambling areas, which is a faster game but nonetheless equally entertaining.

Video Prototype

Here's the video demonstrating the prototype we have built and some of the user feedback we got from our interviewees, who are UST students.

Iteration and Future Plans

After building the prototype, we asked some students to gather feedback about our idea. The comments are overwhelmingly positive as the rubbish bin consisting of the slot machine actually entertains the people near the bin, incentivizing them to throw trash items into the bin. However, the students also pointed out some suggestions and we thought of the improvements that can be made to address their suggestions:

- Supporting more categories of trash for the rubbish bin: Although the bin only supports bottle and can at the moment, we will include adding categories slots for more categories of trash, such as metal, plastics, paper, etc.

- Automatic trash categorization: We can include camera vision technology utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning models in the future to accurately identify which category of trash so that even when the user accidentally throws a trash item into the wrong category, the bin can automatically recognize the error and correct it by reclassification.

- More entertaining games: We can devise more interactive and fun games so that people will not be bored playing only the slot machine. We are thinking of implementing a sustainability quiz game that asks about environmental facts with multiple choice answers, and if one answers it correctly, they will be eligible for a lucky draw. Other games that are fun to play can be easily added later.

Team

Last but not least, a quick shoutout to my team for this interesting project! Really had a great time thinking and building this project.

Team members:

- Junze Li

- Zhiwei Wang

- Zihan Xia

- Jason

- Alva

Personal Reflection

Throughout this project, I learned about the entire procedure from initial observation into the final prototype. The technicalities involved in the process made me realize the importance and contribution of each step: observation, figuring out existing campaigns using mindmap, coming up with the Point-of-View of representative users, brainstorming by drawing storyboards, speed dating to gather feedback from potential users, building the prototype in a practical and cheap way, and reiterating to improve the product. These different steps combine together to make the final result possible; without any step, the result would likely not be as good.

I also acquired the ability to listen to interviewees' opinion and respond effectively to their considerations by refining the solution we have together with the team. In speed dating and the iteration interview, my team and I worked together to improve upon our existing idea based on the user feedback. Because of this project, I developed the skill to more effectively communicate with my team and collaborate together.

I also got to present with my other team member in front of the class and explain our ideas clearly to our audience. Being able to explain our idea in simple and clear words so that they can easily understand and making the presentation enjoyable are the primary tasks, and I am glad that I absorbed a lot from the presentation as well.