3rd Spaces: Unity through Third Places

Introducing 3rdSpaces! Beyond the confines of work and school, 3rdSpaces empowers individuals to discover and document third places in their area and share them with friends.

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Inspiration

What is a third place?

A third place is somewhere you go on your own time, somewhere you spend time, somewhere you enjoy. Parks, libraries, cafes, gyms, local bars that hosts all those indie local bands. In third spaces you can commonly find your friends and community.

Why are third places important?

Third places are important because we are all human, and humans need human connection and community. Everyone looks back on university so fondly and in large part it's because we're in common shared spaces that we frequent with our friends and classmates.

Why do we need an app for this?

Because 3rd places are getting harder to find and access. There are little areas we as community members can go to without having to spend quite a bit of money. Our aim to foster and support third places by enabling regular people to share and connect their favourite third spaces. While not every location you'll find is completely free, every location has something special, that je ne sais quoi you'll find in your 3rd place.

What it does

Find out how active your favourite third place communities are in real time! View how many friends are currently checked in at your favourite spot before you leave. Or see if your bestie has made it to your favourite hang out spot yet. Pin new places through Google Maps. "Check-in" when you when get there to notify your friends.

How we built it

Staring with the template Flutter app, we mocked up a tab bar and the needed tabs for our basic concept and features.

  1. Your saved spaces page
  2. Google Map page
  3. Friends list page

The we expanded by adding buttons and functionality to each tab

Saved Spaces

  1. List your saved spaces
  2. See how many of your friends are currently checked in at that location
  3. "See who's checked-in" button to list those friends checked-in at a specific location
  4. Set your check-in status by selecting a place and clicking check-in/check-out

Google Maps

  1. Display your saved places on a map with pins

Friends List

  1. View friend list
  2. Display each friend's check-in status
  3. Add friend by email

Then added some finishing touches (and fixed some bugs but that's neither here nor there)

  1. Login
  2. Made it pretty
  3. Center, Alignment, Padding etc
  4. Made a logo
  5. 3d printed a phone case accessory that has our logo and a LED light

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we were going to use Firebase and make an entire back end. Unfortunately, using and integrating Firebase for the first time was a bit much. So, we decided to fake the back-end and focus on making a mock-up UI flushing out our ideas and concepts best we could for a proof of concept demo

Flutter is code one run anywhere. Theoretically, our app supports iOS, Android and web. At points we had the app running on our own phones and emulators but config got difficult and so we ended up running mainly on web (chrome)

What's next for 3rd Spaces

There are many ways we wish we could have built upon what we have

  1. Make a real backend - incorporate Firebase for authentication and data storage
  2. Add search to google maps tab
  3. Use google maps search results to save a new place
  4. Filter pins on map page based on cost and type (park, cafe, gym)
  5. Working friend invites & live data
  6. LED on phone case to light up based on friend activity
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