Living Green Brantford
A website and business model to reduce household emissions in Brantford
Agile Design Process
Working in an agile setting allowed for rapid iteration, testing and feedback
1 —
Research
We researched what other communities were doing to reduce their emissions, how to reduce emissions, what Brantford was currently doing to reduce their emissions, and behavioral economics to understand how we could get people to make a change.
2 —
User Testing Sessions
Next, we wanted to understand what Brantford residents thought about climate change and emissions. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Brantford residents of a variety of ages. A resounding 94% of residents believed that climate change is real. Out of those people, however, many thought that a single person could not make a difference or they did not know what to do to reduce their emissions.
3 —
Interdisciplinary
Collaborative Work
We took the information gathered from our interviews to create a persona and journey map the steps the persona would take to try to reduce their emissions.
Problem
The community of Brantford needs to reduce their carbon emission in order to contribute to the fight against climate change
Gain Trust
This website will be incorporated into the existing City of Brantford website for familiarity and to gain trust from the users.
Inspire Others
It will incorporate an interactive map where users and the city could drop pins and post about their contribution to reducing their emissions. This would provide inspiration and ideas to others about what they could do to reduce their emissions. It will also create a sense of community.
Get Informed
The website incorporates information about volunteer opportunities, events, awards, and contact information to local businesses that could help reduce emissions.
Measure Your Impact
On the website, there is also a link to a resource where you can calculate your carbon footprint to gain an idea of how you compare to others and the impact that you are having on the world.
User Focus
Throughout our design process, we continually kept the user at the forefront of our designs and the decisions we made as well as keeping in touch with our client to make sure it aligned with the city's goals.
Once we understood our user's pains and needs we started ideating on possible solutions. Some of these ideas included a community competition, an advertising campaign, and events. In order to reach the most people and allow for continued use, we decided to provide information in the form of a website. We designed the website using an iterative process which allowed for quick changes and user feedback. We had many pivots along the way in order to come to an optimal solution. These included a change in where the information would live and how the information would be distributed.
Snapshots from our process can be seen in the preliminary website sketch photos below.
Canada Day
While brainstorming how the user would find the website we stumbled upon something that gave us a Eureka moment. Drone fireworks! This led us to the idea of transforming the Canada Day celebrations in Brantford into a celebration of Canada as part of a bigger ecosystem.
Modular Display
We came up with the idea of having a modular display that would inform people about emissions and climate change in a fun and inviting way. This would involve an emissions-themed escape room, herb planting, raffle prizes, and information cards which would lead people to the website.
Website
The event will guide them to a website that will allow them to continue to be involved and make an impact in the community.
Solution
Event to guide them to the website
Implementation
Moderation
We want to make the implementation of our solution as simple and cost-effective as possible. The posts could be moderated by the public so that the city would not have to hire a moderator. There could be a way for individuals to report inappropriate or irrelevant posts. The filtering of only the reported posts will not be as large of a task as moderating all of the posts. The flagged posts could either be filtered by an employee or using artificial intelligence to search for keywords.
Retention
In terms of user retention, the extrinsic motivation of having a positive impact on the environment, and a small intrinsic motivation of awards will keep users engaged and continuing to visit the website. The advertising of the website and attracting new users will be done through our presence at events.
Volunteers
The presence of Living Green Brantford at events will help drive people to the website and will therefore inform them of how to reduce their emissions. The event will be modular and easy to move and set up at any event. People will be needed at the tent to answer questions and hand out information. This can be done through the use of volunteers. This volunteer opportunity can be advertised under the volunteer section on the Living Green page.
Student Involvement
The escape room will draw a lot of people to the tent and make them think more about emissions. The escape room can be made by partnering with the game design program. The creation of this escape room could be implemented as a project in one of their courses.
Timeline
09.19 - 12.19
Team
Group of 7
First Year Design Group
Clients
City of Brantford
My Role
UX designer + UX researcher