Sharing is Caring

data in action
NY City forest
bonus rewards
cooperation in action

Inspiration

How can we make the car sharing experience more fun?? Millions of people use their cars every day. What if we could use this network for a greater purpose? In a society where money determines behaviour, could we come up with new incentives and indicators to help people better understand how their car-sharing actions affect others?

This is why we created the "Sharing is Caring" project

What it does

Sharing is Caring challenges people to rethink their values when using a car. The new currency for discounts, free rides, and upgrades are seeds – produced daily by the trees our users grow in the app. Users can make their trees bigger, collecting more seeds, and even earn seeds directly, by performing behaviours that are good for Volvo and the environment. Users earn seeds through quests designed to maximize the availability of cars across a city, users can make trees grow taller through competitions (e.g. Brooklyn vs manhattan), while earning seeds through ensuring that the cars stay clean.

This allows for a more suistainable model, not only enhancing the car-sharing business model but also, our environment.

How we built it

We ran the simulation using python, pulling the data from new york taxi cabs. For better visualization of the data we used javascript, mapbox and webGL. Lastly for the app screen we wireframed them as we run out of time.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of data that needed to be processed in a short period of time. It was hard to make a simulation and to decide which assumptions we where allowed to make in order to simplify the model.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was the first time we visualized the data with javascript. For some of us, it was the first time working as a team in a hackathon at all and yet it was an incredible experience to get pushed beyond the limits.

What we learned

It is good to brainstorm before deciding which idea to follow in order to avoid loosing an absurd amount of time. Overall, Murphy's laws are to be respected, and expected. The thing you thought would be the main challenge of the project can turn out to be easy to implement, while something seemingly trivial will have you sweating for hours.