Plantily

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  Example of Concept Mapping

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  Structured Flow of User Interface

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  Final Prototype

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  Final Prototype

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  Team Picture at 4 AM!

Inspiration

As a team of diverse students with roots in oppression by majority groups, we were inspired to promote racial equality and inclusion within our project. Beyond our personal ties to racial discrimination, our team also brainstormed concepts discussed and revived from the Black Lives Matter movement. Specifically within healthcare (and the severe impacts of COVID-19), we realized that health is impacted by a variety of social and economic determinants, particularly access to proper nutrition and professional support. The BIPOC community is notably one of the most disproportionately affected populations, mostly due to historical colonialistic ideals and intentionally discriminatory legislation. Despite the influence that proper nutrition has on school attendance and future economic productivity, it remains one of the most neglected issues in the world. Proper nutrition is strongly related to racial disparity, being that communities of BIPOC individuals tend to have the least access to healthy foods and resources. Our project, Plantily, wants to dismantle the nutrition gap and provide equal food security for all.

What it does

Inequity in nutrition is one of the biggest problems our country faces today, yet often goes unnoticed. A lack of accessibility and affordability discourages healthy eating, particularly in BIPOC communities. With Plantily, people can connect with their communities and locate local community gardens and grocery stores to find healthier and more affordable food options. Plantily also provides a platform to find recipes, ask questions, and find support for moving towards a more nutritious diet through the “Lettuce Party” feature, as well as an educational platform to learn more about nutrition and health from subject matter experts in the “Lettuce Learn” tab.

How we built it

Our team implemented an engineering design process in order to build Plantily. We started by brainstorming the problems people of the BIPOC community faces and determined that racial injustice in nutrition is a serious problem that many people fail to recognize. Using concept drawings and art-board prototypes, we prototyped different design functions that would allow us to optimize the user interface while incorporating the software functions we deemed absolute. These concepts and art-boards were then programmed into an inVision studio environment and implemented into our prototype app link.

Challenges we ran into

As a team fully composed of freshman with only one member majoring in computer science, it was a challenge to compete in our first Hackathon, especially in this virtual setting. With our limited technical knowledge, we focused on our passion to promote diversity and inclusion within the BIPOC community and creativity to develop our project. Due to the virtual setting as well, our team’s communication required multiple online platforms and group chats. Since we were all prototyping separately (on screen and physically), it made collaboration less efficient and possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are honestly just proud that we finished. For a few of us on the team it was our first hackathon, so it was a great learning experience. In regards to the app, we are pretty proud of the map feature. Originally we were just going to have the community gardens pop up on the map but we later implemented grocery stores and food banks as well. A small feature that we are pretty proud of is the accomplishment box in the home page because it took a long time to work out little bugs and figure out how to make the box flip when you clicked it.

What we learned

We were able to experience the prototyping process and ideation phase for app development, along with how to effectively utilize Invision Studios to model interactions between various parts of the apps. We also learned that in a time crunch, playing to our strengths and parallel pathing is critical to staying on schedule and maintaining productivity for long stretches of time.

What's next for Plantily

Plantily hopes to increase capabilities in terms of outreach capabilities and data optimization. We aim to expand Plantily to serve as a platform for local homeless shelters, providing a connection to low-cost nutritional resources as well as utilizing Plantily as a supportive network for marginalized individuals. Implementation of collaborative filtering algorithms and knowledge-based profiling will provide a better user experience.

Built With

• canva
• concepts-app
• datawrapper
• imovie
• invision-studio
• scratchui
• wekazulu-data-miner