This was an project completed in a learning studio at Purdue University
By Camile Hardt | camilehardt.com
Due to COVID-19, the amount of plastic waste in the dining courts has increased. Although the administration has not gotten rid of plastic take-out containers, there is an on-campus push for students to be more aware of environmental impacts. Through these actions, Purdue’s administration has unjustly pushed the responsibility of sustainability onto students who feel helpless and uninformed of proper ways to fight back. Our goal is to reach out to students and help them advocate for Purdue as an administration to take responsibility.
Throughout the project my team and I mention sustainability and empowerment, we have defined what those terms mean in relation to the project:
4 weeks
CoDesign, prototyping, and research synthesis
Miro, Figma
Camile Hardt (Me), Anne Pivonka, Veronica Tang, Raghav Mandadi, and Evan Burr
<aside> ♻️ Sustainability (n): Encouraging Purdue as an institution to make decisions for the long-term, rather than on short-term increased profit and convenience.
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<aside> 💪 Empowerment (n): Moving students to express feelings through public display in order to place the responsibility of increased plastic waste back on Purdue’s administration.
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We completed a co-design at the beginning of this project to understand the lives of students and the current actions that they take to lead more sustainable lives. After the co-design we found we needed a more direct form of action that pushes the responsibility on the Purdue Administration rather than emphasizing the responsibility on the students.
We initially ideated on creating a website that would be a space for students to share resources or connect with other sustainability initiatives on campus. Since our goal is to empower students to place the blame back on Purdue’s administration – we found through secondary research that information doesn’t inspire people, but art does. This pushed our project to a public art display and helped us realize how powerful community art is when it comes to activism.
The website should evoke emotions in the user such as: outrage that leads into activism that would lead into collaboration. The sketch above displays the different sections of content that were found with takeaways from the co-design and secondary research. There will be images that provoke a specific feeling, an explanation to our approach of bringing awareness, and a space for selection of the building.
Our goal when creating both the user persona and the experience map was to analyze and assemble our primary and secondary research so that we can better understand our users needs, emotions, and motivations when it comes to their own sustainability as a student on campus.
I worked alongside Anne to create this persona and experience map:
