CrowdSourcing Design Sprint

“Environmental cleanliness begins with each individual desire to be clean.”

― Lailah Gifty Akita

Highlights

• Passive crowdsourcing offers perspectives on human environmental relationships
• We systematically use social media to review different areas to clean that many users upload onto the app
• Challenges of getting people to attend the beach clean up (Incentives)
• Lastly, working as a team to keep the environment clean

Introduction

As people living on this planet, we are suppose to leave this place better than it was before, but are we doing so? Answer is quite questionable. There are minimal efforts shown to recycling or other types of trash. We must make severe changes, especially with all the trash that is accumulating in beaches. This issue, causes an enormous impact to the beach pollution. Which can be a huge health risk to many people who goes to the beach to have fun with their peers and family. This problem must stop now! We must take action to clean up the environment and save our planet.

What is crowdsourcing? How does crowdsourcing relate to this phenomenon?

The question lies with many people, what is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is way for a company to outsource a certain task that would be normally handled within the company. Another way idea to define crowdsourcing is that it is great way to get data from the targeted audiences you aim to cater to. With crowdsourcing, people would be able to get their customer’s input on whether the idea for their specific app will be well received or not. If you’re an aspiring company, or a person looking to create a new world breaking app, getting feedback from users through crowdsourcing would be the best way to help you appeal to as many people as possible.

With that, we will use crowdsourcing to gain the attention of many audiences who would want to help this environment and save the planet. Our goal would be to create an app where a user would take a picture of a dirty beach, then upload it to the media necessarily creating a poll to clean up this beach or not. From there other users of the app would agree to clean up the beach and then creating a certain date for this event.

Implications for Design

Using crowdsourcing to attain new knowledge and ideas for companies to help individuals look at complete defined tasks at an affordable cost. Crowdsourcing demonstrates an effective goal to promoting business growth, but in some cases, some critics believe that this strategy can fail due to some challenges. The main challenge of using crowdsourcing that we would imagine, includes that the crowd may not possess the necessary knowledge and good advice, which businesses can rely on to restructure their strategies. From that, some advices that I would give colleagues would be to outline the process thoroughly, identify specific participants, give feedback, and implement the feedback to your design.

Other than the advices, a bad example of crowdsourcing is when a big company allows any participants to include their own feedback from any outside sources. The problem with this example, is if the company does not find selective participant, then anyone would be able to add their feedback, whether it is inappropriate or not.

Designing Keep It Clean

We used crowdsourcing to get feedback on ways to improve our app and connecting it to human interaction. This showcased how the app would possibly impact the users who use our app. Through pictures our storyboard was able to showcase how with our app a dirty beach full of trash would get cleaned up by volunteers or an organization.

Our app Keep it Clean, is aimed towards cleaning public parks and beaches. During our idea process, we got an idea about that aims towards helping the environment. From that, everyone loved the idea because who doesn’t enjoy a clean beach? Through our storyboard presentation, we got amazing feedback on how we could implement some sort of incentive to keep people interested in keeping beaches clean. This was brought up since not everyone would be interested in cleaning up the environment. Our idea to create an incentive was to have free food and entertainment to attract more people to clean.

To keep this event more fair to people, rather than attending the event just for the free food. We have came up with the idea to divide cleaners into groups. Each group would have a set goal of trash to bring, then as a reward they would be able to get some food. On top of that we can have a separate group dedicated towards people with disabilities or other challenges that may prevent them from reaching the quota for the amount of trash needed to be picked up. Another idea, was having a donation booth to people who would want to donate for future events. For an example the donations would go towards entertainment, food, and organizations that can help sponsor Keep It Clean.

Strengths:

• The idea of creating an event that would help our environment
• Layout of the app (Easy to understand)
• User friendly

Weaknesses:

• Did not think of an incentive during the idea process
• How would we keep people from loitering?
• How would we keep people from attending the event just for the food and not cleaning up the beach?

Development For Storyboard Frames

In this frame, you can clearly see a lot of trash. This would add pollution to the environment and make it a health risk to many.

Here we have a good samaritan who notices all the trash in the beach.

At this point, he takes out his phone and captures a picture of all the trash layed out in the beach.

He would then open up our app, Keep It Clean, and upload the picture he just took to the app.

In this frame it might look confusing, but it is all the same concept. We have multiple people who have the app and notices the picture the main person took a picture of in their feed. As we can see in the frame, they are all choosing to clean the beach.

Once there are enough votes to clean up the beach, the event will then be created. All the people who voted to clean the beach, they will all be redirected to this page where they can click the hyperlink to direct them to a poll.

Continuing from the previous frame, the users would be redirected to a poll that would set up the date and time for this event.

Here we have all the people who signed up to the beach clean up. They are all working hard to make this a safe and healthy environment for others.

Finally! The beach has been cleaned and people can enjoy their time in a clean environment. Along with any festivities included or sponsored.

Final Storyboard

Evaluation

The kind of participants we are yearning for our application to affect would be anyone who is interested in helping the environment. After demo day, we realized from the feedback that our app is a great idea and many people would use this app to create clean up events. Once we got the feedback, we implemented the new ideas and modified the storyboard. The one main goal that we were looking at was to find the incentive to make people attend the event and participate in cleaning up our world.