Reuse Depot

Inspiration

Problem

The Northeastern University Oakland campus is a transient community where some students will live for only a single year or semester. Students moving into the dorms, some from across the country or from another country, acquire new home goods, apparel, and other non-disposable items in the process that will have to be rehomed when the student leaves, possibly ending up in the landfill.

Current Solution

The Reuse Depot on campus provides a solution by offering a place students can acquire and donate functional items to save money and divert items from the landfill.

Limitations of Current Solution

The limitations of the current solution are time, space, and proximity. Students on campus need to physically go to the Reuse Depot to know what's available on any day, which can be hard to fit it with classes and extracurricular activities. The Reuse Depot is limited in size and the more items that are there, the longer it takes students to physically look through them to find what they may need. Since students are limited to their use of the Reuse Depot by their proximity to campus, new students are unable to see what items they could potentially acquire instead of purchasing before they arrive on campus.

What it does

Our mobile app provides a virtual depot. Students can upload items they would like to donate without leaving their dorm room, then be notified when another student requests their item. They can decide to meetup with the other student in a common area in the dorm instead of having to go to the Reuse Depot, or they can drop the item off at the Reuse Depot for the other student to pick up later. By matching students donating items with students that want the items, more space is freed up in the physical Reuse Depot.

The app also lets students donating their items directly to the Reuse Depot upload images and descriptions of the items before they drop them off. This aids in cataloging items in the Reuse Depot and allows students to view items available in the Reuse Depot on their phones and be notified when an item they are looking for becomes available. By notifying students when a donated item matches their request, students save time by not having to physically go to the Reuse Depot more than once to look for an item they need and more space is freed up in the physical Reuse Depot.

How we built it

We created our UX in Figma. The app is built as a mobile first application.

Challenges we ran into

At our level of experience, and with the time commitments of classes, we didn't feel we had time to develop our app beyond the concept stage.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to come up with a solution to a sustainability issue on campus with a low execution risk and a high impact.

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma to design the UX for a mobile application.

What's next for Reuse Depot

The physical Reuse Depot on the Northeastern University Oakland campus is open to students, faculty, staff, and the local community. The app will expand to all the same groups. However, students will be able to select if they would like to donate only to other students. Similarly faculty can choose to donate to only other faculty.

The app functionality will also be expanded to include image recognition. AI will speed up the process of adding an item to the app to donate by generating the category, name, and description automatically once the user uploads a photo of the item. If the user wanted to donate multiple items, they could take just one photo and generate posts for each item.

Built With

• figma