YUJIA ZHAO Interaction Design

Challenge

How design can help to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of environmental sustainability.

Research & Insights

we conducted literature review, exemplar study and observations in the realm of green consumption in order to understand the challenges and problems, and get inspirations from existing efforts and designs.

Most of the current designs focuses on providing green information such as carbon footprint to educate or inform people.However, we believe that those methods only help the group of people who have already adopted green behaviors to do better, yet have limited influence on people who do not care that much. We were seeking for a solution that both improves common people’ lives by satisfying user needs and promotes green consumption.

Green consumption is not only about buying green products. Reusing or repurposing, sharing or donating things can increase the use of products and reduce the need for new ones, which consequently reduces mass manufacturing that pollutes environment while consuming natural resources. We saw lots of usable things are dumped away or left forgotten in the basement while consumerism encourages people to constantly covet for new things. This observation reinforced our decision on promoting reuse of things.

We were also encouraged by people’s attitude and reuse behaviors. People do reuse and exchange household items because they can obtain the things they need at a cheaper cost, and help others at the same time. However, the local reuse and exchange are not well facilitated by existing services such as bulletin board, craiglist, mail list, forum and etc. Our core became clear: design a service to support local reuse and exchange of household items.
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Concept Development

We brainstormed many concepts around green consumption along the way. While the core became clear, we nailed down our initial concept – a platform for trading and exchanging household items within a community. We examined the pros and cons of existing services, talked to community members and gathered some insights about how to make exchange an easy and fun experience and how to make it have more impact on reducing consumption. We need to:

• make it easier to post items and update item status
• motivate people to actively remember their unneeded items
• provide clear display for comprehensive information and multiple pictures
• facilitate the communication between sellers and buyers

Based on the insights, we developed our concept, conducted user evaluation on initial ideas, and solidified the initial design in the form of wireframes and digital mockups as Imagine Cup round 1 submission.

Final design and working prototype

We conducted another round evaluation and design critique session, and summaried the following iteration considerations:

• Some traditional exchange experiences are worth incorporating in eXchangeFun such as treasuring hunting experience of yard sales.
• Instead of the traditional classification methods of items, new, fun and personal classification methods might improve experience.
• Providing defected items for others to repurpose helps to increase the use of items and reduce consumption.

We generated more concepts and sketches in iterations, and came up with our final design. In the final design, there are several highlights:

• eXchangeFun provides treasure hunting experience for people to discover items in a fun way.
• The seller’s wish list reminds people to trade unused items.
• eXchangeFun allows people to post multiple items easily by tagging them in one picture.
• To encourage renewal and repurposing of items, the As-Is page allows people to post items with defects.

Building upon the trust and feeling of closeness that people have for their community, the design creates more opportunities for reuse. By reducing the disposal of useful items, less trash goes into the landfills and the demand for manufacturing is decreased. If we can maximize the lifespan of items and encourage a culture of reuse and exchange in our communities, we can take a small step towards maintaining environmental sustainability.

We also developed high-fidelity working prototype using Expression Blend and WPF. We made a video to briefly explain the design argument and show a scenario of how eXchangeFun works.
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Strategy

eXchangeFun should be provided for free so that there will be more people engaged in sustainable behaviors. As for the cost of building and maintaining the site, there are several potential financial sources:

• Landlords who want to improve the quality of living of their apartment complexes in order to attract more renters
• Screened advertisements can be displayed in appropriate areas.
• Increase the rent even 1 or 2 dollars, there will be fairly large a mount of money in a large community.

eXchangeFun is not constraint to only one community. When you filled your address, the system will automatically put your account into the networks of communities that can be considered as local according to your choice of local range. When people move out, they can change their address to join other networks. People without an account can see item information but cannot post their items.

Reflection

Design for promoting sustainable behaviors is always a tough topic because the conflicts often exist between sustainable goals and people’s own convenience. Often times, people think being “green” means extra effort, extra money and limited choices. I think sustainable design should still be human-centered design in the first place. Rewards mechanism or competition-like behavior-change type of design and green information bombast type of design won’t work in the long run if they do not solve the essential conflicts and really put humans in the first place. But in terms of achieving the sustainability goal, it involves more “design-thinking” and collaboration of many fields than only designers and designs.

This project is the most complete design I’ve ever involved. From narrowing down the scope to fine-tuning details of the interface in high-fidelity prototype, my design skills and thinking were improved comprehensively in this project. Sometimes it is difficult for interaction designers to get into the design details, because they’re so used to systematic thinking. Making design right is also very important after making the right design. Working with the details helped me to see how each small element can be vital for the user experience as a whole, and how each part relates to the whole design. Macro-level and micro-level thinking are both required in this project in order to deliver a compelling design.
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