Project Y: Clean Slate | The process of creation
Our three member team is consisted of Izabella, Katerina and Margaret- third year students of Communication Media and Culture department of Panteion University, Athens Greece. In the context of Dare to Challenge Lab under the supervision of our professor Betty Tsakarestou we were assigned project/challenge that has to do with Sustainable Development Goals with social impact. Our chosen SDG is Responsible Consumption and Production, which is about promoting resource and energy efficiency, sustainable infrastructure, and providing access to basic services, ECO life for all. It’s implementation helps to achieve overall development plans, reduce future economic, environmental and social costs. We will focus on raising awareness about reduce reuse and recycle norms through our platform and app.
Millennials are a generation that is the center of attention and research for its controversial social behavior. On the one hand Millennials is a technologically driven self -centered generation and on the other hand is a sensitive, caring, and active generation which holds the key for any upcoming change to the world. At the beginning of our semester when we started discussing ideas for our future project we realized that we as millennials belonged to the self- centered half. This led us to document our daily habits regarding recycling and consumption. At the end of the week we sat down and discussed our results. We reached to the conclusion that we had to immediately research and learn about green habits and change our daily lives by any means possible. Dare to challenge lab gave us a great opportunity to change ourselves and create a project that could inspire other millennials like us to change their daily habits and live a green life.
Our goal as a team is to address the younger generation, known as Millennials, and introduce them to a better life with a green shade. Millennials is a technologically driven generation so the best way to approach them is through social media. Our idea is based on three steps. First is to get our project known, then properly inform our users about recycling and sustainable consumption and production, and finally give them a call to action. We have built a web platform with all the necessary information for our potential users, such as articles, photos, interviews, information about us and how to contact us and everything they need to know about our future plans and actions. (http://urbangetawayofficial.com/category/uncategorized/)
We live in an app-ruled world so there is no better and more immediate way to communicate with our potential users than an application. The Clean Slate app is the key part of our project. By downloading this app anyone will be able to learn about the effects of the materials we consume every day on the environment. Mainly, the user will have the ability to upload photos of his/her neighborhood or any road of his/hers preference in order to depict the environmental issues of the city and ask for help. A simple photograph can speak to everyone’s mind and motivate them to come and help. Generally, Clean Slate wants to show the effects of the growing production on the environment and motivate millennials into recycling and responsible consumption.
FEEDBACK
As part of our research we created a questionnaire, presenting the Clean Slate application and asked millennials to answer the questions, in order to improve the app and find out if it’s appealing. The questions were mainly closed type but we included open questions to better understand their thoughts and opinions, and how well they are informed and educated about recycling and more specific about sustainable development goals.
We believe that this survey offered us a lot and made us understand that a lot of Greek students don’t even know about Responsible consumption and production development goal. Year after year Greeks seem to be non-active concerned recycling but that doesn’t mean that they can’t change. The core of Greece’s problem is their education. Citizens are not informed correctly due to recycling so they do not include it in their daily lives. Although most of the municipalities in Greece have placed blue bins in many locations which are used for recycling paper, plastic, glass and other materials people only use them to throw anything. We come to the realization that the mentality of the Greek people is formed this way to not include recycling in their lives and not understanding its crucial magnitude. Despite all the above, the feedback we received from most of the people was really positive and encouraged us to continue. This was due to the fact that this generation is tricked by the challenges of life and seeks for some big changes.
Don’t forget to check out our previous and next posts in order to fully accumulate the given information and project details!
Teamwork makes the dream work:
https://medium.com/dare-to-challenge/teamwork-makes-the-dream-work-6749aaa83132#.5gz174xmn
User Experience Map:
https://medium.com/@katerinakaouni/user-experience-map-for-clean-slate-app-d73a9ebeb385#.kk1fyousj
Supervisor: Betty Tsakarestou
co-editors: Izabella Kefala Katerina Kaouni
