Silvia's Farm

A community-oriented financial solution for young parents

Overview

Problem:

Parents in their teens or early twenties face unique challenges when raising children. They often feel alienated by conventional authority figures, their friends, and society as a whole. Additionally, they wish they had a trustworthy community to talk to for guidance and support. If that weren’t enough, many young parents are not financially stable and must quickly learn how to manage not only their own finances, but also the finances of an entire family.

Solution:

To help solve these problems, we propose Silvia’s Farm, a cooperative mobile game that allows users to make smarter financial decisions and establish a peer financial support cohort. Silvia’s Farm helps users avoid impulse purchases and also allows them to create a plan towards their future by providing detailed interactive instructions for tailored financial tasks. It also groups parents that have shared goals together in small community which acts as a support mechanism in each others’ individual endeavors. It achieves this by creating a visual metaphor where goals are crops on a farm with four plots representing four users. The growth stage of a crop shows the user’s progress towards the goal that crop represents. Working on an individual goal shared by the whole group progresses not just a user’s own crops, but also a shared tree in the center of the farm. The tree represents the strength of the community, as the community advances towards their final goal the size of the tree increases giving users a visual reward for their progress. The hope is that this metaphor will cause the group to work together to build a successful farm and also encourage networks of parents with common goals to create close-knit and safe communities, where anyone can ask for advice or help.