Gene Lu

New Green City App
Friday, 13 November 2009

Snapshot of epicenter
Snapshot of epicenter
The Problem
In 2007, New York City set a goal to reduce it’s carbon emissions by 30% by 2030. Two years have passed, yet many New Yorkers do not know where the city stands with respect to this goal. Even though the city has released public data in it’s recent data mine containing key information to sustainability, there is still a lack of transparency due to the many obstacles one has to go through in order to access this information. Once users arrive at this huge pool of information, they are faced with the difficulty of interpreting the numerous data sets in an informative manner.

The Solution
New Green City is an iPhone app that monitors the level of sustainability of all 59 districts within the 5 boroughs of New York City. The main screen displays the user’s current and neighboring districts along with their levels of sustainability, which is based on a red to green spectrum, green denoting sustainable. The sustainability level of each district is generated by pulling the following data sets from NYC’s data mine: tree census, recycling capture rate, bicycle parking, playgrounds, and public space.

Overview of the City
Overview of the City
District Stats
District Stats
Challenge your friends
Challenge your friends

Users can also integrate other iPhone apps into New Green City, such as Every Trail (cycling app) and Nike+ (running app). Through these additional apps, users can increase the sustainability level of their district depending on their frequency of usage. Users are also able to challenge friends in other districts to determine who’s more ‘green’, which is based on the data pulled from the other apps installed. To encourage users to participate on a frequent basis, all data sets pulled in from other apps are resetted on a weekly basis.

By establishing an app that allows for integration with other apps, we create a mobile app ecosystem, which allows users to transfer existing data from compatible apps already on their iPhone, along with injecting a social aspect into the process.

Process flow for New Green City
Process flow for New Green City
Profile Setup - Select a borough
Profile Setup - Select a borough
Profile Setup - Select a district
Profile Setup - Select a district

Profile Setup - Add Other Apps
Profile Setup - Add Other Apps

The Process
Concept

To do a bike app or not
To do a bike app or not
When I first searched through the data sets on NYC’s data mine website, I immediately thought about creating a bike app. A lot of bike-related information such as bicycle parking, paved streets, etc. popped up and made it an obvious choice. After some thought, I realized that there would probably be a hundred other bike apps that would be submitted to the Big Apps contest. I took a step back and wrote down the data sets on post-its and looked for interesting data set combinations.

After rearranging the post-its for two days, I came up with a group of data sets that would serve as my data source for what would eventually be known as New Green City. Initially, I knew that this set of information wasn’t enough and that it didn’t offer any kind of user engagement to make it viable in a saturated app market. Instead of competing directly with the hundreds of biking, running, etc., New Green City would serve as a mobile app ecosystem that would pull all other apps together to help make efforts to reducing the carbon footprint more transparent.

2009-12-09 03:21:21 Stewart McCoy
Implementation Did you develop the app, or was this project conceptual only?
2009-12-09 04:02:14 Gene
@Stewart Hey Stewart, it was conceptual only, unless you have extra money laying around to help me develop it. :)
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