EcoPup

Akif Ahmed, Kcee Landon, Sabrina Lo Judy Pearson, Benjamin Fornia

When going to a store, sustainability practices often become an after-thought; reusable items such as bags or cups are easily forgotten, and for those looking to shop at stores based on their sustainability policies, comparing them can be difficult to do. This is especially true in college towns where stores are more local and have limited information available on them. In a college town like the U-District, students usually aren’t driving around in cars where they can easily keep things like are usable bag to bring to a grocery store. Moreover,even when stores themselves are making sustainable efforts that customers do not need to do anything for, sometimes they receive backlash for it; this is often true for stores that charge for paper or plastic bags, or do not offer bags to begin with.

Realizing all this and through conducting user research on both college students’ and stores’ struggles with sustainable shopping, we decided we would work on a solution that addresses these needs. In particular, we decided we would focus on the University District in Seattle. Sustainability efforts is something that is hard to get others actively involved in, so we figured that a local solution catered to specific stores in the U-District would be most effective.

Although this targets anyone who shops in the U-District,a secondary goal of ours was to target freshmen at the University of Washington and have them retain whatever they learn about sustainability through our solution throughout their time at UW; this led us to developing a maps-based application.

For our solution, we designed a mobile application, EcoPup, that opens up to a map of stores in the U-District, more specifically stores on University Way, or “the Ave.”

From here, the user can select a store that is participating with our application and view the sustainability information for it. We wanted to use a map to display the stores to allow users to use the app to navigate as well. By combining sustainability information with navigation, we aim to have users come back to the app to find sustainable stores,see where they are on the map, and then retain information about which stores are sustainable through repeated usage; this is how we are aiming to target freshmen as mentioned earlier. Since most of them would be new to the area, there would be more of an incentive for them to use an application that has both maps and sustainability information for the stores they would be going to.

After selecting a store, first, they can see if that store has any sort of reminders such as to bring are usable bag or mug.

Then, the user can view a sustainability score assigned by our team. Our sustainability scores are based on these main factors: waste management, sourcing, packaging, money spent on sustainability efforts, and community engagement in terms of sustainability. To quantify these, we reached out to several stores and asked those willing to participate ~15 questions about their sustainability practices. These are the specific factors we considered for each of our 3 score categories, which are out of a 100.

Waste: composting, recycling, offering/usage of reusable dishes, choice of plastics, internal waste practices

Product: organic materials usage, vegan options, local options, disposing of local products

Community: sustainability efforts and general engagement in the community.

For the overall score, we summed the scores in each of the 3 categories.

One of the biggest features in our application is the ability to directly compare a store’s sustainability against another similar one.

By going to the compare tab, the user has the option to select one of the displayed nearby, similar stores, and then they can see the scoring differences as well as a description describing the differences in sustainability between the 2 stores.

Throughout our design process, our focus was clear- we wanted to make it easier to care about sustainability. Every feature we implemented aided that goal, from finding stores on a familiar interface to the commonly-used google maps, to easy access to sustainability information and summary scores, to simple reminders seen right when you tap on a store. With how easy we found it was for sustainability to become an afterthought,it’s clear that a tool like EcoPup is needed to make sustainability important to everyday shopping, and with the work we’ve put in to make it, it’s clear that EcoPup is up to the task. If you’d like making greener choices easier, check out EcoPup at our repository below!

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