Fiber Cycle

The Problem

During the summer of 2020, I participated in Western Founders’ Network’s Product Design Sprint alongside two teammates. We had 24 hours to design a solution to reduce annual amounts of plastic pollution in any setting. With the time constraint in mind, to learn more about the problem space, we spent 2 hours researching 3 of the top sources of plastic: e-Commerce, apparel, and food packaging. We considered two main possible user personas; the first were university students who care about appearance and the second were restaurants who often use plastic utensils or takeout containers. I researched the e-Commerce pipeline while my teammates researched the other two pipelines and for each, we considered industry trends, environmental impact, and opportunity for innovation. After presenting our research and product ideas to each other, we discovered that the apparel industry was the best match to our criteria, specifically fast fashion. We centered around two facts: for a typical clothes wash, up to 700,000 plastic fibres could be washed into the ocean and that the amount of microfibres produced annually by Canadians’ laundry was equivalent as the weight of 10 whales. This was a wide-spread problem as many people do their laundry without this knowledge in mind. Inspired by ThinkDirty, I helped produce our solution-validation model: to ensure that our product would create a real impact, we focused on the buckets of awareness, prevention, and call to action. 

The Solution

Our solution was “Fibre Cycle,” a mobile app and Chrome extension that calculates your plastic footprint via scan or key-in, alerts you of more eco-friendly alternatives, and retains user engagement by illustrating your tangible impact (e.g. number of animals saved). “Fibre Cycle” helps to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean by educating users on the toxicity of commonly found clothing materials such as polyester and nylon and making it easier for them to adjust their purchasing behaviours. We make it easy for users to feel proud that they are saving the ocean animals.  I contributed as a visionary and UI designer with business and technology knowledge. Not only did I suggest product feature ideas and help design the prototype on Figma, but I also assembled the pitch deck and supported our solution with additional data points. Additionally, I helped create our user persona: an environmentally conscious millennial who makes conscious efforts, such as drinking bubble tea with a reusable straw, but is unaware of how they are killing ocean animals through their laundry. 

If our solution was developed to be fully functional, we could validate and monitor our solution through success metrics like number of bounce rates from toxic fashion sites (higher the better), number of material searches through the app (shows users’ enthusiasm), and retention rate (measuring long-term impact). 

Reflection & Results

The biggest challenge about solving this problem was narrowing down the scope as “any setting” is a vague prompt. I learned that nitpicking at the problem with questions and considerations helps produce a better solution. Furthermore, by focusing on three main buckets-- awareness, prevention, and call to action--we ensured that our solution solved a need users actually cared about and placed first overall. After the hackathon, we continued iterating our solution by collecting judges’ feedback, administering user research surveys and adjusting our prototype accordingly. If I had more time during the design sprint, I would want to conduct user research earlier and include the findings in our presentation.