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sugr

sugr takes the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor and applies that principle to simultaneously reduce waste and build up local community.

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Inspiration

Many tools and objects are bought then only used once. The average power drill is on for 13 minutes its entire life. With items being used and disregarded, we’re creating an environment pointing toward waste. About 30 percent of all U.S. “garbage”[*] is packaging, which is of little use to consumers and is typically thrown out after a product is purchased. A new idea is collaborative consumption, where items can be shared and used between people and the community.

Many people already have resources that others in their community need, but only 26% of Americans would say they know most of their neighbors. Nearly a third say they’ve never even interacted with their neighbors.

There is an irony in the fact that in an increasingly “connected” world, more and more individuals feel more disconnected than ever. How might we create a culture of sharing within local communities?

What it does

sugr takes the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar from a nearby neighbor and applies that principle to our own communities. By leveraging the ubiquity of online tools and technologies, we can reduce waste while simultaneously building up strong local communities.

By creating a collective network of peer to peer resource sharing, we aim to boost community belonging while simultaneously helping out with small day to day needs.

Additionally, sustainability is a positive externality of this sharing economy as it keeps additional products that would have been bought from sitting around unused.

How I built it

Our team chose to use React Native with Expo and Firebase for our tech stack. We chose these tools and technologies because they give us the most flexibility for future growth, and had a good combination between ease of use and feature set. In addition, our development team wanted to grow technically and learn these tools.

The design team chose to use Adobe XD for the wireframes and mockups.

Challenges I ran into

As a team, we spent a bulk of our time at the beginning ideating a couple different problems spaces with a goal of finding pain points that would be worth trying to solve. It was difficult to choose something that we felt was both relevant but also had opportunities we could work in.

On the development side, our team struggled through learning how to implement Firebase into an Expo project. This was unfamiliar territory for all in our development team, so we just had to work through the initial learning curve to try and connect every together.

Along the same line, creating a React Native application with Expo and Firebase gave us additional hurdles to work through. Because we wanted to use Native Base components, we realized there were some compatibility quirks that meant several frustrating hours working through strange error messages and unhelpful StackOverflow answers. Finally, the Hot House wifi network gave us issues both with its speed, reliability, and firewall permission limitations.

On the design side, our team found it difficult to visualize a point system we were envisioning for the platform. This is an interesting challenge we found in working on an interdisciplinary project, as our team comes from different majors and backgrounds. Coming together around an idea is one thing, but making it tangible brings about all sorts of other challenges.

Our designers were also unfamiliar with the design framework we chose to use with Native Base, which was based on the Material Design language. But although there was a learning curve in a new visual framework, they were able to transfer their design skills and just adopt the new components into the project. The team also used a beta coediting feature which introduced some bugs and issues they had to deal with.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

With many hackathon projects, it's easy to get discouraged as you go through the process of finding what you think is a great idea, trying to come up with a solution, and putting something together all in a short day. It helps to realistically scope what's possible, so our team is proud of what we were able to show for our work this weekend.

After a morning of brainstorming and ideation, we were quickly able to start work to flesh out our business model, app mockups, and basic prototype. By focusing not solely on a technical prototype, we were able to clear more ground in having a better understanding on how the application might work. But also putting in a large chunk of our efforts into actually creating an app demonstrates the feasibility of our proposed solution and what next steps might look like. Although the prototype may not be as flashy or polished as a final product, having something to show was a very important deliverable for our team that we're proud to walk away with.

What I learned

Through the hackathon the key learning point was teamwork and communication. By working through our ideas as a team and understanding different viewpoints we created a thoughtful and balanced application to solve household waste with community engagement. We learned to apply concepts of design thinking such as identifying the problem space, ideating, and creating mockups in a team environment. I also learned how to program with multiple people through Visual Studio Code with liveshare. Further I learned the basic steps to creating a physical solution for an identified problem by creating an application with JavaScript. React Native, and a Firebase database, designing a UI via Adobe XD, and creating a business model.

What's next for sugr

We would love to build out a more feature complete MVP and begin customer development on one our local communities in SLO. This would help us better understand the problem area to work backwards and continue implementing features that will bring value to our target personas.

References

These were some of the things we found in our research of the problem area.

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