Judges Choice: Eco Friends | Making cities more sustainable with information and activities.

What is the problem you found?

Our problem is that people find it hard to know what actions to take to help them live a more sustainable life. They are often presented with information in documentaries and via the media however these often do not provide tangible next steps to make a difference.

What is your opportunity?

The opportunity we identified is: 'How might we move towards a future where cities are a sustainable place to live?

We want find a way to motivate people to change their daily habits to be more sustainable, almost effortlessly, and to move towards a future where cities are a beautiful yet, ecofriendly places to live. We want to create something that is motivating for all age groups and is easy enough to access.

Who is your audience?

We want Eco Friends to be accessible to all age groups and abilities, and in the future, we want to adapt the Eco Friends website into a place where you can listen, read, learn and do.

In the process of creating Eco Friends, we used the Pains and Gains method. We created a customer, a young adult who is busy with life, but wants to make time to help change. There problems are that they aren't sure how to help, and that money is tight, and that they are busy with university.

We discussed how Eco Friends would make a difference in their life and said that this person would be able to have quick information about the climate crisis, and that there would be easy things that they can change in their daily life, that wouldn't take time out of their day.

What Is Your Solution?

Our idea is to create a free educational website, that informs people about the climate crisis, and includes many categories that provide immediate solutions.

When we thought about watching David Attenborough documentaries, or other show that informs people about the climate crisis, we noticed that it often left us feeling hungry to do something, yet we didn't know what. Most TV series and movies are like this, they offer information but not a solution. We wanted to have the same effect as these shows, by creating a website with videos and information to offer immediate information about small and big changes to make the world and cities in it, a more sustainable place.

Through the website we will offer monthly paid subscriptions, that include extra information and competitions to enter in by setting up subscriptions and investing this money into our growth Eco Friends is a social enterprise. 

In the process of building Eco Friends, we made organization boards, prototyped with the website, an introductory video, and created a survey that asked people about what they would like to get out of our website. The results showed us that many people wanted to know how they could help in the community. This was valuable in the creating of our website, and helped us in understanding what we needed to include.