Wecycle

-- Let's recycle via SNS

Jin Huang, Jesse Liu, King Xia, and Qing Xia

Overview

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Our mission is to create a recycling social network which will allow users to share and discover innovative uses for recyclable material.

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Overview - Notable Details

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• Operating under the working title "Wecycle"
• Users can share, comment, and save submissions
• Users can find others locally to share materials with
• Users can participate in a Q&A section for various queries
• Users can search through past submissions
• Focus on the submissions as the material sharing function is covered in part by freecycle.org

Implementation

Implementation

Evaluation - Strengths

• Gives people something more to do with waste other than throw it away
• Gives people inexpensive versions of otherwise expensive goods
• Has immense potential - influence increases exponentially with users
• Harnesses peoples' recreational time towards a greater goal
• Feasible to set up
• Relatively easy to expand

Evaluation - Weaknesses

• Requires significant impetus before gaining momentum of its own
• Money and altruism as incentives are mutually exclusive to some degree
• Other projects could potentially have more impact
• Requires significant upfront investment
• Needs to stand out from all other existing social networks and services

Persona 1: Mellie Mora

Location: Austin, Texas

Job: housewife

Age: 36

Background: lives in Seattle, have two children.

Hobbies: 勤俭持家

Persona 1: Scenario

Mellie finds she has more free time now that her child is a toddler. She has turned to arts and crafts to bring some decor to the house. She likes the idea of recycling materials into more usable items, but mostly because she finds it a novelty. She finds Wecycle while browsing the web on a whim one day, and begins to browse it, making the items which catch her fancy. However, many of them are too complex for her, requiring tools and expertise she doesn't have. Many are interesting to her, but she can't find an avenue to purchase the products, either. She loves the chat room on the site though, and spends many hours there.

Persona 2: Feng Wang

Location:Beijing, China

Job: Artist

Age: 26

Background: Major in Sculpture

Hobbies: Create unique things. Good at making sculptures by using different materials.

Persona 2: Scenario

While surfing the Internet, he accidentally found "Wecycle", on which many novel ideas about how to reuse the waste were posted. Some users on Wecycle transform waste into practical appliance or works of art.

Recently, Wecyle inspires him a lot on a statue that he is working on. He found many useful materials in the donate section.

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Persona 3: Russel Malley

Location: Beijing, China

Job: entrepreneur

Age: 28

Background: Russel went through college with a focus on business, and has since moved to China to do business there. He looks down on companies which unduly hurt the environment to operate.

Hobbies: Bridge, soccer, clarinet

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Persona 3: Scenario

Russel has a recycled-material business venture but does not want to invest any capital until he has a good idea about the market. Russel uses Wecycle to both test the waters and build up a consumer base for his product before producing it. He gets his product critiqued and builds up some hype before setting up a company to produce it. Unfortunately, it will be a while before he provides international service.

Persona 4: Jesse

Location: somewhere in the USA

Job: student

Age: 22

Background: first-year graduate, major in computer science

Hobbies: Foods, don't pay much attention to anything else

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Persona 4: Scenario

Jesse was born and raised in China, and came to US to pursue his master degree this year.

He mainly relies on scholarship and part-time jobs to pay daily expense. He is particular about foods and doesn't pay much attention to other stuffs. As to the articles of everyday use, the cheaper, the better.

Jesse often uses Wecycle to browse the website and find money-saving submissions to fill his needs. He constructs and orders cheap goods, use Q&A to find cheap materials and good ideas, receive unwanted materials and spend free time socializing with other people on the site in chat rooms or via private messaging.

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