We have all tried to be more sustainable at some point, maybe you put in more effort to recycle properly, or maybe you decided to walk or bike somewhere instead of driving. However, these environmentally friendly choices can be hard to consistently follow, especially when those around us are not doing the same thing. We need a way for everyone to be committed to the goal of creating a sustainable planet - because individually our choices are good, but if we work together as one we can make a bigger impact
With Grow Ithaca, we propose a solution in the form of an iOS app that is an easily accessible hub for all things sustainable to promote local sustainability practices.
Grow Ithaca provides an Ithaca-based collaborative database for making informed purchases, asking questions, and staying up to date on all things sustainable. Specifically, we have implemented three main features, a discussion page, a news page, and a resources page:
- On our discussion page, users can engage in conversation regarding local environmental care practices, such as "Where is the best place to recycle my batteries nearby?" or "Anyone interested in cleaning up litter around Ithaca Falls?". This fosters the creation of a local community where users can guide others in making sustainable decisions.
- Our news page instantly provides filtered news regarding the current events in environmentalism and sustainability both locally and globally so users can be well learned in relevant current events.
- Finally our resources page is an accessible resource that provides external links to many sustainable brands organized by their product, such as clothing, food, or household supplies. The purpose of this page is to help users be more conscious of where they shop by providing many alternatives to the likely well-known less sustainable option. The resource is also collaborative, as users can make suggestions of local sustainable businesses to add to our growing database. These suggestions will be fact-checked by admins before being published.
We first prototyped our design in Figma so our Frontend team would have a reference in implementing the iOS UI using swift. Our backend type worked in Django to implement our databases, relationships, and API.
Our biggest challenge was deploying our backend and integrating it with the frontend. Routes were tested using postman before making commits and deploying to the frontend, but we encountered unforeseen issues in our deployment using Docker and Google Cloud.
In tandem with us overcoming our challenge in the initial process of integrating our frontend and backend, we are very proud of how much app functionality we were able to accomplish in our short time frame. We implemented filtering and sorting, get and post API networking functionality, and a pleasant user interface and experience.
We all increased our skills in the programs we have used through a lot about backend to frontend integration and rapid prototyping. It was some of our team members' first time using certain programs and languages so we also learned to deal with a learning curve in short time frames by dividing work according to strengths and interests.
Grow Ithaca can “grow” to facilitate the creation of sustainably driven communities in other cities. We have specifically implemented the app for Ithaca, but we could take in each user's location and forward them to communities within a certain radius. We believe Grow Ithaca has the potential to get people talking about sustainability in a greater volume to spread the goal of creating a sustainable planet.