Making Sustainability Sustainable: APPLANET

Today, more than ever we are living in a society built upon consumption and pollution. We wanted to change this pessimistic outlook to the future, to do so we needed to make people adapt to sustainable lifestyles. In our research, we saw that people gain habits harder and harder when they have to go out of their comfort zones and most of the sustainability habits are out of their comfort zones. Therefore, we believed in design were, people will step by step change their habits and convert their world into a better place. For this, we came up with Applanet, which is an application.

In Applanet, you will build your world, you start with a simple white page when you register and when you do the tasks which are concerned with making the world a more sustainable place, you will gain little badges and these badges will transition themselves to your white page. To preserve these badges, you need to repeat the same action in a limited timeframe. For example, if you gave water and food to street animals, you would get a dog badge, and dogs will appear in your world. However, if you do not repeat this action in a week, dogs will disappear from your world. So, our message is, you can shape the world, but you have to keep repeating your actions to sustain this beautiful world. You can share your Applanet world on different social media platforms and invite your friends to change and create their worlds too.

Target vs Actual Accomplishments:

The first 7 weeks of spring semester were spent on finding the topic we wanted to work on. Having interviews with our respective target audience in order to get a better understanding of the problem. Weeks 7 and 8, were spent on brainstorming with group members and Koc University Social Impact Forum, and after transitioning into the online period. We decided to unite.

Weeks 9 and 10, were spent on how this application should function, which process should we pick. We agreed to face our problem with gamification and creating little challenges along the way for users to interact more with the app, and deciding to name our app, Applanet.

Weeks 11–13, spent with creating presentations, working out finer details of the Applanet. For example, which tasks to use and which icons to pick for a demonstration. Also, designing some application photos to explain the app better. Week 14 was spent on setting future tasks and plans for Applanet and presenting our project.

Target vs Actual Accomplishments:

We achieved our major targets, such as creating our app’s user interfaces and logo. For target, we wanted to have some communication channels for our prospective sponsors. We did not have a breakthrough in this part of the project, but we are hopeful to find sponsors. Because we are aiming to band together with the people who are conscious, ready to make a change, and the exact target audience for companies. For the future, some of our members have coding experience and some of our group is studying computer engineering, thus we were planning to code the infrastructure of our platform in the next terms.

Resources and Stakeholders:

For now, our biggest resources are our motivation to leave behind a better world and create sustainability habits in people who use our app. Time to time, we did lose our motivation especially having a pandemic did affect our motivation. However, with the pandemic our lives moving into more of a digital world than it already was, and with the idea of Applanet, we started to believe that we can change this digital world into a more sustainable one. For stakeholders, in the future, we might need to work with the Engineering Faculty and have advisors for the marketing of this application, since we will need to have a strong marketing strategy to succeed.

Analysis:

In the process of creating our app, we have searched and analyzed other applications that target sustainability, environment, and social impact. Especially for using gamification, it was important to analyze how other applications reach their target users. Then for testing our app with our targeted users, we have created an imaginary interview about our application’s aim and main features. We have sent this interview to our friends with a survey and tried to get detailed feedback by asking specific questions in it.

Social Impact and Innovation:

We tried to find the reason why people, start to take action for a more sustainable world but stop after some small steps. This is one of the biggest reasons why we cannot create permanent solutions for suitability and pollution issues. Applanet tried to tackle this issue as our motto suggests we want to have sustainability which sustains itself. For this, in our interviews with our target groups, we saw that if we managed to change the habits of people, we might succeed to create a sustainable world. To change habits, we must do it slowly and people need incentives to go out of their comfort zones, also most of the people did not believe what they do affects the world that much. Furthermore, most of our target groups enjoy applications that are built open gamification philosophy. Thus, we combined, creating habits slowly with gamification to ultimately reach our goal, making people believe that they can create a better world by just changing their actions and work to achieve this better world. By seeing in Applanet, the world they created, we believe people will be much more motivated in this better and sustainable version of this world.

Risks and Issues:

We needed to find a way for making our user’s experience of our app enjoyable, by choosing cute and generally well-received icons and badges, we believe when a user gets a badge, they will look at the world they created in a positive way and maybe be happy about it. We had to combine our two different target groups and have a prototype that is usable and suitable for both. For this, our target group was not that different but adding the option of sharing their worlds in social media and using cute icons we combined our two targets and made Applanet enjoyable for both groups. One of our biggest problems was, trying to combine our two different groups, which was hard because our teammates all have different visions about this project and trying to find suitable hours for all group members to work on the project, sometimes posed a challenge. However, our shared goal to have a sustainable world brought our different visions closer to each other and created Applanet as a result. For scheduling difficulties, we shared tasks among us and made sacrifices to have the crucial meeting together.

Needs:

For the most part, we need to have a lot of users to get sponsors and achieve our goal. Our surveys showed that most of the people who listened to our explanations of Applanet would recommend Applanet to their friends. Additionally, we would need a coding team to code the Applanet according to our vision. We would need a good marketing strategy to gain more users. In the future, we might want to change the outlook of our pages in Applanet which would require working with a designer. Most of these needs could be met within our university and our fellow peers.

Schedule:

For the most part, we have met our deadlines. For the future:

• Code the infrastructure of Applanet
• Plan a marketing strategy
• Need to meet with our prospective sponsors
• Need to have a beta test
• Create scoreboard*, and different challenges** along the way.

*Scoreboard is a new feature we planned to add. It helps you to share your gained points from the missions you accomplished. You can compete with your friends after you invite them to connect with you. You can go to their Applanet and check out what they did to their world. Furthermore, for the top contestants in the scoreboard, we are planning to give them gifts from our sponsors.

• For example, doubling the gained points on a specific day (“Green Day”).

As the Applanet team, we are driven by making people believe that they can create a beautiful world, and they need to protect this world to keep it alive. This parallel’s our team’s motto, which is making sustainability sustainable. Today, more than ever we are living in a society built upon consumption and pollution. We wanted to change this pessimistic outlook to the future, to do so we needed to make people adapt to sustainable lifestyles. In our research, we saw that people gain habits harder and harder when they have to go out of their comfort zones and most of the sustainability habits are out of their comfort zones. Therefore, we believed in design were, people will step by step change their habits and convert their world into a better place. For this, we came up with Applanet, which is an application. In Applanet, you will build your world, you start with a simple white page when you register and when you do the tasks which are concerned with making the world a more sustainable place, you will gain little badges and these badges will transition themselves to your white page. To preserve these badges, you need to repeat the same action in a limited timeframe. For example, if you gave water and food to street animals, you would get a dog badge, and dogs will appear in your world. However, if you do not repeat this action in a week, dogs will disappear from your world. So, our message is, you can shape the world, but you have to keep repeating your actions to sustain this beautiful world. You can share your Applanet world on different social media platforms and invite your friends to change and create their worlds too.

Team Members: Beyza Özdemir, İrem Nur Bulut, Baran Altun, Serhat Coşkun, Alü Sütcü, Gizem İşlek, Mehmed Said Adar, Oya Suran, Cemre Korkmaz