The 2022 Digital Design for Sustainability Hybrid Hackathon concluded with more than 100 students, faculty, and staff attending the speakers' presentations and participating in the Turtle Hurtle design contest.
Below you can find the recordings of the presentations and learn about the winning projects!
Digital Design for Sustainability Speakers
Drew Bridewell I Founder of Next Level UX, Head of Design and Product at GrowthDay
Take a Deep Breath—let's Talk About the Power of Design Intention.
"Focus on the people, empower the community, then bring intention and context into all that we do". This past year placed a magnifying glass on what matters most to each of us. Family, careers, joy, and life fulfillment. Whether you're a seasoned pro, or just getting into product and design you'll learn fast that without strong peer building networks, community, and support the pursuit of life fulfillment can feel like a lonesome path. However, it's 2022 and we live in an age of a technology boom, with so many tools, so many opportunities, with limitless potential.
In this talk, Drew Bridewell, CHPC will reflect on the evolution of GrowthDay, a 2021 Startup that was founded to help bring personal development to the world through the use of tools, community, and life coaching. Built and founded during COVID, GrowthDay is a cross-platform personal development app. Led by world-renown 3-time New York Times bestselling author and High-performance coach, and CEO Brendon Burchard. GrowthDay had 20 years of research and has been serving the community without an app. You'll see what's possible in 1 year with great intention, responsibility, and empowerment.
Drew will also uncover the power of how rituals and routines played into the early success of this platform. Drew will also discuss how he leveraged his training and development platform. Next Level UX to develop frameworks around the most important areas of focus when building new companies, teams, and relationships while manifesting a rich learning and high-performance culture.
Cass Taylor I Purpose Marketing Lead | Adobe
Perceptive Design with a Purpose
Today, information is consumed in various ways at an extremely rapid pace. This will alter how one approaches designing a digital experience that can impact society that is not inclusive and sustainable. Perceptions are lived experiences that can filter into one’s design thinking. The designer needs to liberate themselves from the routine of perceptive thinking. This liberation is the basis for all innovative design. Considering the dominant role of a deliberately oriented perception in the creative design process, we consider design as a Perception-in-Thought Method. Design is more a study of human perception and how it can impact the senses we feel or want to feel. Designers can shape and form our visual experiences in the best way possible, but they cannot always predict the outcome. That’s why it is so crucial for design to become much more human-centric, sensitive, and as close to the actual experience as possible. Using the human experience to integrate a purpose-driven methodology in using reflective perceptions to design a digital experience that focuses on 4 trust signals, Humanity, Transparency, Capability, and Reliability. A societal approach to the full digital experience for inclusivity and sustainability.
Regine Gilbert I Industry Assistant Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Accessibility and Sustainability
Inclusive Design is sustainable Design. We are responsible for creating worlds of experiences, environments, services, and systems that impact millions of people – with lasting impacts. There is more to be done to elevate its power in the sophisticated world of technology, where accessibility is critical to one’s experience. So what else can we do with UX & Design to broaden technology’s reach, and what design solutions can we build into our services and products to make them more consciously inclusive?
Katherine Kao Cushing I Chair and Professor, Department of Environmental Studies Director, Global Studies, San Jose State University, Senior Advisor at CommUniverCity San José
What the World Needs Now
Young adults today are worried about climate change and concerned that governments are not doing enough to combat it. Here in California, we are living proof that one outcome of a changing climate, extreme weather events, such as wildfires and droughts, are happening more frequently and are more severe. To mark the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, Dr. Cushing will provide a global context for understanding climate change science, impacts, and adaptation and mitigation options using the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent findings. Additionally, she will speak about the importance of loving nature and each other as necessary conditions for human progress.
2022 Turtle Hurtle Design Contest
For this creative contest, we asked students to create a climate game or app to educate and inform them about disaster risk reduction and what to do in the event of a natural disaster. It was up to the students if they wanted it to be about just one or all of the climate disasters. The game/app created by the students will teach about climate change through engaging, science-based gaming experiences!
Below you can find the winners of this year's Turtle Hurtle Design Contest
Hazard Strike
First Place
Design By: Samina Qadri and Samatha Hamada
Hazard Strike is a mobile game to connect families and inform all party members about safety procedures during an emergency event. This reflects information from a site called ready.gov, which helps families understand and provides tools to be safe in an emergency. Many apps on the market that are about natural hazards are mostly oriented toward news of events for adults and not a source to provide information about preventative measures, or simple games that have no application to homelife for kids. This app is for those missing pieces and allows the parents to monitor, keep the child’s information safe, and adjust accessibility for their child's use of the app. Parents will create an account for the family and give their child access to play games in an individual or family setting. The child can access a series of games on their own account to learn safety procedures in a low intimidation setting. The parents can monitor their child’s progress, limit playtime, and set checkpoints with family game nights. These game nights are for the parents to set about an hour to interact, learn, and set emergency protocols with their kids. This mobile game is for both parents and children to apply game knowledge and try real-life simulations.
Open Ocean
Second Place
Design by: Rachelle Bedell, Mona Korani, and Zehra Momini
Open Ocean is an interactive learning game that teaches users about ocean and tsunami safety and ocean conservation. The ocean plays a crucial role in regulating the earth’s climate through carbon storage and oxygen generation. Research has shown that the current amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is already too high to sustain healthy coral reefs which contribute to food and flood protection. Healthy, sustainable coastal and marine ecosystems are vital to an overall healthy climate ecosystem. Through games like Open Ocean, we hope to bring awareness to the vital need to protect coastal and marine areas and to provide education about how to navigate oceans, safely.
Bear Prepare
Third Place
Design by: Jelica Abad and Abigail Torrez
Bear Prepared is a family-friendly game that aims to educate people of all ages about
natural disaster risk prevention. Depending on the user’s region, the user will help guide our mascot, Grizzly, as he navigates through different natural disasters that can occur in that region. Our app is intended to be a resource that people can go back to if they need it, so we also have features that allow users to go back and remember the steps they can take to protect themselves and their loved ones in the wake of a natural disaster. We believe it is important for people to not only know of the natural disasters that they can be affected by, but how they can prepare for them — that’s what Bear Prepared aims to do.
Climate Crew
Award of Excellence I
Design by: Andrea Casas Topete and Merlina San Nicolás Leyva
Climate Crew is an app dedicated to those who want to make a change. We help people connect with environmental events happening near them. The user will create a profile based on their interests, browse and add events to a calendar, and get reminders. The user can also share the events with an outside person, send them by email, or share a link. We hope that with Climate Crew, more people will get involved in environmental activities. These include attending recycling centers, joining beach or river cleanup groups, attending speaker series to learn more about natural disasters and the current climate crisis, or simply planting a tree. The app is designed with an earthy color scheme, friendly to people that might be color blind. We also focused on spacing to make sure that we cater to all users - from teenagers to adults! We also added a message feature so our users can contact event coordinators and managers. We hope Groot and the Avengers make the experience a lot more fun! Cheers!
Florashing Life
Award of Excellence II
Design by: Julee Nhek and Vanessa Jian
Florashing Life is a mobile app game aimed to make learning about wildfires and our ecosystem more fun and enjoyable experience. Wildfires have destroyed habitats and homes for not only us but the ecosystems as well. With our app, we focus on sharing information about wildflowers and other flora and their contribution to restoring the land. As you grow and restore the location, wildlife will slowly come back, restoring the ecosystem. The app is designed with a whimsical style to have it more inviting to people of all ages. The illustrations were created to help further the more approachable style. In the future, these illustrations could be used to further customize the landscape to allow the world to be livelier and more vibrant.
California Wildfires
Award of Excellence III
Design by: Kylie Harrop-St John (Project Designer) and Candace Farmer (Project Researcher)
For the 2022 Turtle Hurtle Design Sprint, our team focused on the rise of California wildfires. California has been going through drastic environmental changes from global warming with reduced rainfall and a three-year-long drought which has made the state more susceptible to wildfires. In 2021, California experienced its largest wildfires in history, spanning over three months devastating thousands of residents and homes. Our team’s goal is to highlight the state of environmental emergency that California is experiencing with wildfires while providing community and individual resources to help prevent the spread of wildfires. Utilizing Adobe XD interactive prototypes, we hope our app highlights the importance of this issue during Earth Week.
WYLDFIRE
Award: Honorable mention I
Designed by: Brianne Badiola and Mia Wicks
WYLDFIRE is an app designed to keep the user informed of wildfires designed by Mia Wicks and Brianne Badiola from San Jose State University for the Turtle Hurtle: Digital Design for Sustainability: A UI UX HACKATHON. As the climate crisis we are experiencing intensifies, the wildfire season is becoming more frequent. People need a concise way to access safety information before, during, and after a wildfire. We have designed an application that will follow first responder action as they work to contain and extinguish the wildfire. The home page is a map that uses your position to show you the location of the fire, firefighter dispatches, hazard lines, and community safe meeting points in the event of an emergency. There are two other sections to the application: wildfire safety information and community updates. Wildfire safety includes sections on protecting your home before the wildfire, packing an emergency bag, and returning home after a wildfire. The community section allows users to opt into signing up for a personal profile to learn more about a situation from people in the same area linked to their zip codes. That way people will be able to share pictures and location information of fire outbreaks with their neighbors, as another tool to be safe in the event of a wildfire.
Zoey and Redd Talk about Wildfires
Award: Honorable mention II
Design by: Fred Guess
The app is an interactive story with a one-game element to help educate children on what wildfires are and how to be prepared. The app would be aimed at children in the range of 6 to 10 years old. The app is also designed to encourage the child to engage with a parent or guardian in planning for a wildfire. The main characters are animals that live in the forest. The app tries to keep the language and concepts something children can comprehend. I hope you enjoy it.
Event was organized by Tina Korani and John Delacruz
This event was funded by the College of Humanities and Arts, Artistic Excellence in Programming Grant. Other sponsors include Adobe, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at San Jose State University