RE

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this product after researching the lack of transparency of large relief organizations, such as the Red Cross. People are hesitant to donate their resources there because they do not know what their donations are specifically going towards. We saw that current organizations perpetuate a tendency to view disasters as opportunities for short-term charity. However, we want to pour resources into figuring out how to prevent these disasters in the first place. We chose to provide humanitarian aid to Texas because it is ranked first in the U.S. in the variety and frequency of natural disasters, and we have experienced floods, hurricanes, and deep freezes here. We saw how many individuals within our communities were underprepared and wanted to create a centralized platform for disaster relief.

What it does

RE is a centralized platform that bridges communication between individuals in need of natural disaster relief and those that have the means to provide it. We are targeting people affected by natural disasters and people with the resources to help those in need. Our product uses donation-based funding to help mediate these interactions.

How we built it

We prototyped our product using Figma. If we had time to implement it, we would have used React Native for the front-end and Firebase for the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

The time crunch was one of the biggest challenges we ran into. We wanted to create a strong, feasible product so that it can actually be used to aid in local disaster relief. Since we spent a large amount of time ideating and design thinking, it was difficult to implement our product. We wanted to ensure that the user experience with our application was intuitive and easy since our platform is intended to be used during critical times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to fully design a well thought out application, applying many design principles we as programmers do not typically think of in a very short time period (starting from this morning).

What we learned

We learned how to quickly ideate humanitarian problems and solutions. We learned how to design on Figma and created a full-fledged mobile app on Figma for the first time on our own. We were able to get a full immersive experience of what it’s like to design an application from scratch, taking a human-centered approach from beginning to end.

What's next for RE

In the future, we hope to expand our non-profit to states outside of Texas and continue to build an image of trust and reliability by maintaining our promise of long-term relief.

Built With

• figma