adopt an iceberg, support polar research
April 15 - April 16 2023
Claire Goldwitz, Michelle Gelberger, Minjun Chen, Yasmin Akhavan, Rohail Khan
Riley Liu, Grace Zheng
UX Researcher, UX Designer
SPARKS is an annual designathon hosted by Wellesley in Product open to designers of all experience levels. Over 3 days, teams will collaborate to solve a design challenge and build a prototype that addresses a theme set by the hosts.
Eco-anxiety, also known as climate anxiety or ecological grief, is a growing mental health concern that arises from the fear, stress, and anxiety people feel due to the current and potential impacts of climate change on the planet and society.
"Every time I hop on TikTok, it's just a bunch of depressing news about climate change. It feels so overwhelming."
Anonymous Interviewee
The core features of this experience can be broken down as follows:
Users are able to discover Drifting's services online, where they can symbolically adopt an iceberg by making a purchase on our website.
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After downloading our application, users are able to track where their adopted iceberg has been and receive spontaneous updates on any animal encounters, aiming to spark joy in their daily life.
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Included throughout our app are educational resources and news articles aiming to educate users on efforts being made in ice research, spreading awareness and also moving away from a catastrophic-news focus.
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Eco-anxiety has been stated to sometimes be bad enough to take over people's lives, particularly with constant news access.
Interviewee focused on how the issue of climate change often felt too big and overwhelming for their individual contributions to make any difference.
For many, this often gives rise to feelings of apathy because of the constant stream of negative news.
From here, we created a primary persona based on secondary research and an interview. The Anxious Expert persona is reflective of our findings from this leg of research.
Because we encountered many cases of eco-curious individuals in our research on eco-anxiety, we also felt that they should be considered in our application. A secondary persona was therefore created to account for this unique user group.
We then focused our ideation on a specific subject area in the climate change realm to ensure that we don't overwhelm users with too much information at once. Following some disucussion, we landed on a proposal:
In this designathon, my partner and I applied many of the learnings we gathered from our last experience. We made sure to scope our screens and take care that we were not asking for an unreasonable amount of features. We both additionally tested our limits, as the UI we designed for this project used colors which neither of us were familiar with, or comfortable using. I am extremely proud of the final result of this exploration.
Additionally, in honor of the theme of spontaneity, we put a lot of emphasis on throwing ideas on the table and just having fun— and I feel that what we produced captures that spirit.
