What if There's an App That Helps You Fight Climate Change (Part 1: How it all started)
What drove me to build this app? What are the main goals?
My colleague thought climate change was a hoax.
It was another record-breaking hot summer day. I came out from a client meeting and was walking back to my office with a colleague — a smart ivy-grad with an impressive resume and a long list of accomplishments.
Walking down the road with a stench of hot asphalt in the air, we weren’t talking much. Then just to fill the awkward silence I said, “Climate change is really getting out of hands huh?”
But the platitude was met with a great twist.
“Isn’t climate change a hoax?”
Turns out, he read an article when he was much younger on how the Earth’s temperature changes as the atmospheric carbon level fluctuates. He was just a kid, and he hastily assumed that the rise in temperature was just part of that natural cycle.
Accompanied by a total lack of interest in the environment, he stayed inside his shell of beliefs that global warming is something completely natural.
But he wasn’t a kid anymore, and with some recent data, it only took him a couple of minutes to accept that human-caused climate change is real.
It took him just 30 more seconds to casually move on to ordering his coffee in a non-reusable plastic cup.
Climate change made me cry as a kid.
I had a slightly different reaction than my colleague when I first found out that we’re destroying the environment.
I was seven, and I had Taekwondo classes every other day. At the end of training, we had a 10-minutes of “fun time” where we either played games or listened to stories by our sabum-nim (master) - mostly coming-of-age stories of famous athletes, or scary ghost tales.
But on one abnormally hot day, he told us a story of a near future where the icecaps melt and all our houses get flooded. He emphasized how this isn’t like his ghost stories of questionable origin, but a very much a real one and how we’re the ones causing it.
It was scarier than any ghost stories he had ever told.
I went home and asked mom if any of this was true. When she confirmed the story (although she corrected the exaggerated details), I broke down in tears and cried out of sadness and fear.
This is still one of my earliest yet strongest childhood memories, and the fear of climate change stuck with me ever since, helping me to always be climate-conscious.
Climate-consciousness is a spectrum.
Being climate-conscious is not just a 0 or a 1, but everything in between.
I’m not a climate activist, but simply someone who tries to keep good habits. My colleague wasn’t a stubborn non-believer, but just someone who did not care much.
From my experience, most people fall under one of these groups below.
Climate Professional: Experts who work in climate to impact policies.
Climate Activist: People who vocalize the issue and take actions daily.
Climate Caring: People who take the issue seriously and try to adopt habits to the best of their abilities.
Climate Aware : People who are aware of the issue, and try to take actions that are not too inconvenient.
Climate I Don’t Care: People who are aware of the issue, but won’t take any actions unless there’s reward or penalty.
Non Believer: People who strongly believe humans aren’t the main cause of climate change.
Primary Goal: Help people move up the spectrum.
When trying to change people’s minds or behaviors, it’s important take it one step at a time. After all, for a phenomenon involving billions of people like climate change, every small action from each individual makes the greatest difference.
The very first question I had in mind when I wanted to tackle climate change was a more general one: What if there’s an app that helps people fight climate change?
But after seeing that there are people all across the spectrum, I narrowed it down to this.
What if there’s an app that help people move up the climate-conscious spectrum?
Next Step: Users, Questions, and Hypotheses.
Of course, there are now hundreds of thoughts in my head. What problems do I need to prioritize? What strategies would be the best to retain each group in the spectrum? (For example, for the “Climate Caring” group, one feature could be giving them guidelines or reminders to take climate actions more easily. For the “Climate I don’t Care” group, the features would have to tell them in one way or another that there are reasons and urgency to care.) What business model is the most sustainable?
In the next post, I’ll be laying out all possible users and important questions, prioritize problems, set potential directions/models, and come up with corresponding hypotheses.
It's very pretty, congrats.
I like that it feels both calming and urgent.