Sustainable House Builder

Home screen
This really is your house!
Look at those solar panels!
Now the pool :)
Check out that green grass!
Woah, your house is big!
Your property is also big, but size doesn't matter :)
Interactive! Happy trees

Inspiration

We wanted to make a fun and interactive tool which allows people to very easily see ways in which they can live more sustainably. Given that in a year or two, our team will have to consider renting an apartment / buying a home, we have considered what is truly important! In that spirit, we wanted to make a tool which brings to the foreground the environmental impact of these homes / apartments and improvements that can be made in the short / long term in order to live more sustainably :)

What it does

We ask a user for some information including their (prospective) home address and use ScaleAI's API in order to help the user interact and highlight different areas of the home which may need these upgrades in the future to live a greener life!!

How we built it

We used ScaleAI heavily in order to process the user's information and create a fully interactive experience. We used an HTML template to help with the framework, but from there most of our work was focused in javascript calls to our backend server which connected with ScaleAI's API

Challenges we ran into

This is the first time either of us have been to a hackathon so there was a big learning curve in understanding how to use API's in general and how to accomplish what we wanted. There was not enough time for fully finishing and polishing our product fully, but we still think it (overall) looks really good !

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're both very proud of the final result and are happy to have made something so incredible!!

What we learned

We learned how to use API's! (and in the process, we made over 2000 somewhat spamy requests, but 39 real, not spammy, essential requests that each help our product greatly!), we learned a lot about HTML, javascript, and python. We also learned how to set up our own python server in order to create real API calls and how to connect a webpage to python in general!!

What's next for Sustainability Hack

We would like to consider the inside of houses as well and allow people to upload images where we can use ScaleAI's tools further in order to expand upon the interactive displays. We imagine a future where people can easily snap a pic of their living room and our interactive tool tells them exactly what things they specifically can do to lower their carbon output! Right now, all of our information is general, however, we'd love to create enough information so that we can help everyone with their own room / kitchen / house :)

(Stanford Center for Ethics) Most Ethically Engaged Hack -- Written Narrative

When developing our idea and prototype, our team considered the ethical implications of our product each step of the way. The idea for our project was inspired by our team’s interest in looking for solutions to fight climate change. We decided to focus on spreading awareness of the climate impact of certain elements of a house. These include the size of the house, the pool, foliage, driveway material, and whether there are solar panels on the roof. We know that homes in the United States are being bought at a high rate, yet the climate impact of newly sold homes is not a focus of the general public in the fight against climate change. Thus, by bringing awareness to the possible climate hazards of a home, we can make an impact on the reduction of energy usage, water usage, and the spread of hazardous materials. During development, our team recognized that our project had not been inclusive for underrepresented groups, who are less likely to be new home buyers. Therefore, a next step in the development of our project will be to include features that take into account appliances inside the house as well. We can recommend ways that users can use less energy, water, and hazardous materials so that users can save money and improve their health while lessening their negative environmental impact. This would have the benefit of involving underrepresented groups in the fight against climate change. This is important because many of the ways that most people can lessen their climate impact require a certain income level, such as solar panels, which also requires one to be a homeowner. We hope that it is clear that the ethical considerations of our project are known to users because the website gives information about the climate impact of each of the elements of the house mentioned above. In future versions of our project, we also wish to include information about the effect our website will have on spreading awareness to specific underrepresented groups, such as those who are low-income, racial minorities, and women. Lastly, our team was diligent in identifying the ethical considerations in the deployment of our project. We will be making use of web servers and APIs which are computationally expensive, and thus, will use more energy than the usual amount to host a website. However, we believe that if our project can make a significant impact in changing peoples’ decisions in home designing to consider the effects on climate change, including their energy usage, this will be a net positive.