Project: Spotfinder

Team Members: 

Simon Mihevc, Project Lead

Cher Huang

KB

Summary: 

Road pollution is one of the leading sources of greenhouse emissions. In order to reverse the ongoing environmental degradation we need to start taking immediate steps to counter the downwards spiral in which we are currently spinning. The idea behind Spotfinder project is to target one particular area of our daily lives that needlessly involves overpolluting the environment - parking spot finding.

The goal of the project is to eliminate the activity of parking spot finding alltogether, thus making parking less polluting and a more pleasant experience. The main challenge of the project is how to build an app or a responder, that gives a driver directions to nearest parking spot in desired location. There are many challenges that need to be addressed: - how to collect a database of parking spots in a city - how to secure a parking spot for one driver - handling traffic peaks

Sustainable Development Goals:

• Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

• Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Good Health and Well-Being

Skills & Resources Needed:

• Emissions specialist (understanding how much emissions are there exactly and how to reduce them)

• AI engineer (finding a parking spot on the fly for thousands of people effectively is quite a challenge)

• UX designer (making an aesthetically pleasing unobtrusive parking spot app or chat app) - software (app making, backend systems, integrating with existing systems)

• Hardware expert (potentially for securing a parking spot)

• Public project specialist (experience with public tenders for funding)

• Pitching (showcasing and selling the system to interested parties), business model design (how to create a sustainable venture on parking spot finding)

• To evaluate an effectiveness of such a solution we'd need data on: the number of parking spaces in one or ideally more cities, average time spent searching for a parking spot, existing systems in place for solving such or similar problems

Post-Capsule Goals:

Hobby Project

Project Motivation:

I feel climate change is real and requires proper action to reverse a dystopian future towards which we are headed. I also find my professional work so far was largely ignorant of the most important problems of our time. 80% of success is showing up to create a real change and with this hackathon I'm taking one step forward to a more purposeful future.