Design Project 1 | Preparing for Elevator Pitch

Use this page to collect your initial thoughts about issues to be addressed in your Elevator Pitch. Plesae jot down a few ideas in each of the follow sections.

Adoptability

• What are the considerations that will affect peoples’ decisions about whether to adopt and use your design idea.
• Considering format: chrome extension, amazon filter, app, website, search engine
• primary goal is to be easy to use and can apply it to the brands/methods you are already used to while introducing other alternatives/helping you make informed decisions
• Are there potential barriers that will slow down adoption, or that you’ll need to overcome.
• businesses not wanting to be transparent, but our metric will be using publicly available information to format our product reccomendations
• marketing/framing the product as a tool for consumers that helps exert choice/power over the overwhelming supply chain
• just another app/add-on fatigue
• this is something you install once and do not have to think about again. . . unless you want to!
• What aspects of the existing situation will need to change?
• people willing to download so that overtime our framework can help them make the changes they want to make in their life
• to improve the end goal/vision of what the product is trying to achive, the market will need to shift first, but I think this tool will be helpful in mobilizing change

Pricing Model

• What’s the pricing model for your idea?
• free app, with minimal advertising
• building partnerships with local/sustainable brands. . . we reach out to business, business pays small fee, they get featured in our local-impact
• Is there an upfront cost? Or a subscription cost?
• free version, and subscription version
• subscription you can further customize your profile, get reccomendations for local sustainable alternatives weekly, and get access to more powerful filters/metrics to analyze brands
• Are there any rebates or other financial incentives that will help lower the cost and reward the behavior?
• potential for businesses to just want to be on our platfrom/radar and pay to have a section on the website/newsletter if they can pass certain sustainability benchmarks

Sustainability Impact

• How does your design idea improve sustainability?
• reducing the impact of shopping by helping people make informed decisions about the impact their purchase makes on the world
• miles shipped, materials used, and wasted materials on returns all add up and contribute to our excessively wasteful and extractive culture. Reducing consumption and making smart shopping decisions helps people make more sustainable choices while maintaining their agency and choice
• How big is the problem now? What’s the baseline that you’ll compare your idea to?
• amount of wasted products in landfills and atacama desert. want to decrease the amount of unecessary shopping done in people’s lives, increase local economy purchases, increase sustainable materials/processes purchases
• could approach this with a rating system, similar to how the product rates the impact of potential items a user is shopping
• What delta will this make? How can you quantify or measure the impact of your design idea? And how big a difference could your design idea make?
• measure impact through rating. increased sustainability rating = more local sustainable choices
• users can opt to have this presented as dollars in the local economy
• boxes saved from landfills
• tons of carbon or VMT saved
• could shift both the amount of purchases made AND shift the types of brands/practices that are supported when understanding impact is more clear with transparent data

Competitive Advantage

• What else is available to your users now? What options do they have?
• Good On You: https://goodonyou.eco/#
• website formate where brands are reccomended for certain purchases, but you as a consumer don’t know what to compare it to and how it translates to “sustainability”
• have to trust the rating given to us without knowing the materials they use, how that translates to tons of carbon etc
• goodhuman
• site that only has vetted brands; eliminates choices for users
• in comparison, my tool will still allow users to look at the brands that they like/understand pricing and size but understand exactly the impact they are making
• Are there other products or services that promise similar results?
• How do you compare to them?
• what sets my tool apart will let people apply the ranking to any product they are shopping with, customized to the priorities most realistic to their lifestyle (avoiding fatigue/burnout) we are in it for the long hual and understanding the impact of our consumption is the first step in shifting behavior, and my tool as the next step waiting for them (suggested alternatives)
• also has potential and power to shift brands we like to meet more sustainable metrics due to demand

Use of Design Thinking / Human-Centeredness

• How does this design idea address the essential need identified in your POV statement?
• people WANT to change behavior and be more sustainable but do not have the time/energy/resources to do it
• understand what they are looking for (certain materials, fit, look, price) but hard to find while grasping the impact of their choice
• this tool consilidates that information into ratings that are easy to understand and transparent based on the constraints of their lifestyle/purchasing options
• How did your design idea evolve based on the steps in the design thinking process? (Observing > Interviewing > Defining a POV > Ideating > Prototyping > Testing > Interating)
• went from clothes sorting to online filtering
• realizing that people need help in the decision making process… and to avoid more online returns need to reduce consumption in the first place and empower people to be more like the Careful Connies I interviewed too

What’s the Roadmap?

• Is there an path of future development that could evolve from and extend your design idea?
• building a following —> community/reccomendations from others —→ connecting to other local markets/providers that have better impact and introducing them to new customers in the area
• growing local economy, building partnerships with local organizations, and reducing overconsumtion via online shopping
• could even influence development of land/cities by increasing the demand for more sustainably sourced shops and storefronts to avoid shipping from across the globe
• How could your design idea grow?
• offering individual profiles, reccomending brands, ethically sharing data with local partners to help them identify new consumers (maybe not)
• evolve into a type of certification or rating that becomes as salient as cruelty free or vegan on other products