A7TeamCacti

A7TeamCacti

To-Do

• describe the most important themes from the lectures for your project
• describe important themes for your project that are not discussed in any of the course lectures

describe the most important themes from the lectures for your project

The themes of energy and motivation are core to our project. We are working on an existing frame work called Footprint, that helps people understand their carbon emission's based on their movement. Our project tries to accomplish the low barrier for entry and motivation to improve habits by linking with an existing (and widely used) application: Foursquare.

By building off of another service, the barrier for entry is lower, since all a new user would need to do is authenticate against foursquare to get a basic picture of their emissions. Basic motivations to change are shown quickly, as it will take very little work to classify a user's movements according to the method of transportation and to calculate their environmental footprint from that.

Our project also fits in with Tools for Learning and Living (Lecture 4). It is a tool for learning, as it helps users find out about their transportation habits and carbon footprint. It is a tool for living as it helps users become more conscious about their emissions and push them towards walking, biking, or using public transportation more. The application can help the user feel more connected to the environment.

Approach to Energy involving HCC (Lecture 6) directly ties to our project, since it is trying to use HCC techniques to help increase energy consciousness. The app closely follows ideas of providing supportive social environments, automating processes, and providing information.

The class definition of utility fits in with the project's goals as well. We aim for the value to be high (by providing useful statistics and insights) while keeping effort low (by integrating with existing systems like foursquare).

describe important themes for your project that are not discussed in any of the course lectures

Living a "quantified life" (1) by means of continually tracking details about what you do. Our project will only be successful if user's make an effort to track their location frequently with Foursquare. This tracking falls under the theme that, by tracking data about yourself in a quantifiable manner, one can come to many interesting conclusions. Do you eat out at restaurants more than at home? Do you often get more sleep than you think you do? Questions like these and more can be answered simply by recording statistics about your life. This can be re-phrased as "how computers can lower the barrier for data entry and tracking to assist in finding patterns and information about a person's life" or "how can computers help us know more about ourselves?".

Interface design specifics. In class we've talked about more abstract notions such as tool visibility, attracting users, being easy to use, etc. In the case of our project we will need to actually apply some of these ideas in a more concrete way. We will be designing and building an interface to be actually used, so ideas like information architecture and visual design become important.

(1) http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self.html