A couple of weeks have passed and we have been rather busy developing the idea we settled for, the “Klimagotchi” app.
Throughout the previous weeks we had one motive in mind; how can we make people aware of the changing climate and at the same time encourage them to explore environmental friendly choices?
One of our main concerns with today's climate communication was the lack of information about climate friendly actions people can take to impact the environment positively. We believe that informing about climate change and its devastating effects alone is not always enough to spark a feeling of interest. One thought is that some may be losing interest in the climate debate and feeling helpless when no practical solutions are offered.
Our Klimagotchi app is therefore going to combine gamification as well as motivate users to take real life actions to better the climate. To make this possible we want to combine real world aspects within a game to raise awareness. The first step towards bringing life to this concept was making storyboards to visualize and describe the app's components. Since we want to engage people to take climate-friendly action we have included “challenges” in the app that will pop up on a virtual globe. Once clicked the user can decide to take action or ignore the given challenge. If the user chooses to take action the challenge will be added to the app’s “goal” section and will be marked as done when the challenge is completed.
The thought is that the app is going to have a geolocation tracking mechanism as well as tracking of your food purchases through Trumf. Therefore if the user partakes in a challenge and does the opposite, for instance buying a lot of meat and constantly using the car when the challenge says not to the app’s globe will be negatively affected. When challenges are completed on the other hand, the globe will look green and healthy. Here we put a lot of emphasis on gamification and making your choices dynamic with the health of the globe. By completing challenges in real life, like riding your bike to work instead of taking your car, you could directly affect the wellbeing of your own Klimagotchi globe as well as the real world by being eco-friendly.
The home-screen of the app, from storyboard to prototype in Adobe XD
We decided what the app should consist of when we made the storyboard and the next step in the process was to develop a prototype in Adobe XD. We could finally start creating icons, interactivity and molding this idea into what we had imagined the app to look and feel like. Up to now we have had two iterations of prototypes and improved the first one based on feedback and further ideas into a prototype 2.0.
We have some questions and challenges that we will need to address going forward. For instance the “goal” aspect of the app needs to be further developed. We are also thinking about whether we should start coding the prototype to better present our concept without the restrictions that Adobe XD currently has.
Our collaboration is still through digital communication tools, and even though it has its challenges we are adapting into this new way of working. We are looking forward to going into this next and final phase of module 2, and so far we have a good feeling about our prototype!
Anette, Joachim, Kornelija, Maj-Inga & Marianne