Your team’s goal is to choose a group of people that face difficulty making sustainable decisions, and then design a product that influences their behavior to help them meet their goals. You may target any relevant user groups, such as high school students, car owners, clothes shoppers, people living in the city, or parents! However, we encourage you to try to stretch yourselves and pick a user group that you all do not consider yourself a member of; this is so that you will not rely too much on your own experiences during user research as personal biases can potentially affect your research findings. Over the course of the quarter, your team will work on designing a system to help this group of people make decisions that let them live more sustainably on a daily basis.

You should identify activities your user group participates in that are potentially environmentally unsustainable and consider how your design will enable them to make eco-friendly choices. Think about how you can leverage technology to support modifying users’ activities to make them more environmentally friendly, or ways to persuade your users to change their behavior, or support them in their sustainability goals. Potential design solutions that support activities within these domains could include (but aren’t limited to) providing a map of local green businesses, locations of nearby recycling centers, tracking a household's food waste, or an app that sells second hand clothes.

Here are examples of prior projects from similar courses with target groups and ideas that would be relevant under this theme:

• A tool forpeople who want to recycle to better understand what waste they produce and accurately sort their waste https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse440/19wi/assets/projects/wasteplacer/
• A tool to help people manage food waste by keeping track of the food in their fridge: https://cse440.medium.com/no-waste-planet-c0f5ec6335b/
• A tool to help people manage food expenditures by keeping track of food they have in the house:  https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse440/20wi/projects/pocketgrocer/
• A tool for sustainable shoppers  to find out about local businesses when they shop online: https://cse440.medium.com/localize-helping-small-businesses-recapture-the-market-167c4912bb0d
• A tool to help people manage food expiration dates by providing updates when food is close to expiring: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse440/20wi/projects/fridgigotchi/
• A tool for people to find commuters to carpool with: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse440/20wi/projects/poolbuddy/

As part of your project, you will need to define what a specific community’s needs are that your project can help support, and what activity you would like to design to help address this need. While your design may not be able to address this head on, it may be useful to consider the conditions that cause making environmentally conscious decisions difficult while conducting user research and learning from your target group. Think about how the activity you chose is currently supported via technology (or not), what doesn’t work about current ways of supporting it, and how your solution will do this better. Finally, be specific in the community and specific target users you select! The specificity of addressing a particular group of people allows you to deeply think about what makes the group unique and how you would best want to support them. So, dive in and see what you can come up with!