Over the course of the 10-week class, my team was tasked with designing a service that increases sustainable travel on Northwestern’s campus. We presented our idea to the stakeholder, SustainNU and the solution is currently inspiring the groups efforts for sustainable travel.

Working with SustainNU, we developed an app that encourages sustainable travel by offering carbon-conscious travel options for getting around town and allowing users to track their impact. The app, SUSTAINtrip, works by accumulating student-favorite locations and compiling the three most sustainable travel options, for students to choose what fits their schedule and help the environment.

From our research and tested prototypes, we found that students wanted to be sustainable, but also wanted the choice of when and how. Additionally, we saw that students were traveling in three main categories: travel, entertainment, and shopping. From these two insights, we decided to move forward with an app that gave students the tools to travel sustainably with multiple options to fit their lifestyles.

For our team, I served as a Design Researcher, interviewing potential stakeholders in our service on Northwestern’s campus. These included Northwestern students and faculty. Additionally, I worked as a graphic designer, designing our deliverables and the final app wireframe we presented.

Our process started with research: interviewing Northwestern students about their travel habits and conducting research safaris on public transportation. We made personas for our ideal users, along with stakeholder maps to measure the breadth of our project. We then moved to ideation, generating 200 ideas before narrowing it down to a single idea to prototype. From our first prototype, we learned it did not fit with student behavior, so we moved back to what is now our final idea, SUSTAINtrip.

Looking back on our project, I would have spent more time in the prototyping stage, trying more than two ideas to gain more insights. Additionally, I would have liked to go through a second round of prototyping research before presenting our “final” idea. In the future, I will use the research and ideation skills I learned to apply to any problem I am looking to solve.