THE GREEN DEN | My Site

©Orin Dhauwer

Our team

Our team is call team ECOnnect and composed of Orin D'Hauwer, Xinyi JI and Me. We are one of the two team present in iLab module during the Summer Semester 2022.

Introduction of project

The semester started with a challenge we needed to deal in team. At the beginning, the team was composed of Orin and me. This challenge definition is :

“How can people live in a more sustainable and climate-friendly manner?”

Thanks to this challenge definition, our first step was to find and define a problem we wanted to solve related to this challenge. So, after many researches and brainstorms, we come up with a problem definition :

“How can we reconnect people to nature to empower them to take responsibility for their actions, and to motivate them to live more sustainably?”

To explain a little bit, due to increased urbanization, people have lost their connection to nature, and they have become desensitized to the climate change narrative. So we want that people have a way to being reconnect to nature and have the possibility to change their way of life into a more sustainable daily.

All of this first introduction part was presented in a presentation meeting call "First Gate" where 3 teams presented there challenge introduction with there problem definition. This presentation allowed only two teams to continue with there challenge through the end of the semester and mark the end of the first introduction part of the challenge. The third team was obliged to be separate and join the two other teams. Hopefully, our team ECOnnect succeeded to this first gate and was able to continue with this challenge. Furthermore, we had the chance to welcome Xinyi in our team!

Solution Discussion

After this First Gate, we introduced Xinyi to our topic and our current advancement in the challenge. Then we started to brainstorm and reflect about three different solutions that we can develop related to our problem definition. The three solutions was :

- EcoQuest : an orienteering game where people can discover local shops in their city or go hiking in nature area near their home;

- Step&Go : a website where you can choose a trip according to your characteristic (busy or not, alone, in group, ...) and you just need to pay and everything else is organised for you;

- The Green Den : a community center where people can meet and enjoy their time to work there or do workshop. In this place, there is a lot of plants and relaxing sounds.

When this three solutions were develop, we come up with a logo and a small prototype for each of the three solutions to present it during a meeting call "Solution Discussion". We presented our three solutions and received a lot of feedbacks from the people present during the presentation. After this presentation, we were obliged to choose only one of the three solutions. Thanks to these feedbacks and a time of reflexion, we decided to stay with The Green Den's solution!

Prototype

After this solution discussion and chose The Green Den's solution, our semester turn into cycles. We had 4 cycles where in each cycle, which each last 2 weeks, we had different objectives and a presentation at the end of each to show our advancement and to receive feedbacks to improve our solution and define new objectives.

The main objective in these cycles was the prototype: we turned a room in the university, room B.1.08, into a small community center as The Green Den where people can comme and relax by working, spend time or read with plants around them and a bird sound.

©Orin Dhauwer

So we spend one week to set up the room by, first, plan to buy the plants in a shop: Dehner. We bought approximately 30 plants and we needed 3 kart to carry them.