Piss'd Off

Inspiration

As a group, we were inspired to create an app that addresses the issue of gender disparities in public restrooms. We've all found ourselves waiting in long lines for women's restrooms at public places, or have heard similar experiences from friends and family members. Since this issue affects a lot of people and there is a lack of motivation for companies to make a change, we were inspired to create "Piss'd Off" . Our app holds companies accountable for their restroom wait times and pushes for change. We are passionate about promoting equality and accessibility and believe that this app can be a powerful tool to make public restrooms more equitable and accessible for everyone. We are a diverse group of individuals from different backgrounds and genders, but we all share the same goal of making a difference in this area.

What it does

Piss'd Off tracks the users' gender, location, and time spent waiting in line for the restroom to create graphs showing the gender discrepancy at different organizations.

How we built it

Our app permits users of any gender to tap in and tap out when they enter and exit a line for the washroom, respectively. Data about the user’s location, gender and wait time is stored in a secured database, where it is later analyzed and displayed in meaningful data visualization graphs. For instance, the ratio between the average wait times of males versus females at different washrooms in different buildings across the globe. As a result, certain organizations are publicly pressured to create change to address this issue.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the hackathon was spent testing and debugging code, which required us to read a lot of documentation. That being said, the predominant challenge we faced appeared at the start of the hackathon when we faced many difficulties in brainstorming a creative and technologically-demanding project (refer to "What we learned" section).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, completing a hackathon is no easy task regardless of one's technological competence. For us, we are proud of ourselves for having supported each other or persevered in times of doubt. All team members entered UofT Hacks X wanting to build a project that we would find meaningful, and we unanimously agree that it did just that.

What we learned

There are TWO parts to a good project: technical complexity and idea applicability. For the majority, the former is the first consideration; everyone wants to develop a project that implements popular new technologies. However, one must not underestimate the importance of the latter. In fact, many popular (but simple) present-day applications were founded based on an idea, an idea that many might have found pointless or repetitive at first. We gained insight into this when we debated the quality of the idea. After some thought, the lesson explained above became conspicuous.

What's next for Piss'd Off

The future is bright for Piss'd Off. Some features we previously thought about adding include: taking advantage of the decentralized Estuary blockchain platform to save data more securely; "fine-tuning" the "command-medium-nightly" co:here model to detect emotion in the feedback of a future washroom-rating system (e.g. potential bias). Another attribute that we would like for our app to potentially become is a data-collection source that provides valuable information about washrooms, including their cleanliness or finding 'unpopular restrooms' (i.e. paid toilets in urban European cities).