Question: Team Members Full Names:
Answer: Feixing Tuang, Yujia Zhao

Question: Title of Project:
Answer: eXchangeFun

Question: Project Overview:
Answer: Our concept of eXchangeFun encourages people to exchange and reuse household items within their residential communities. Its goal is to promote sustainable consumption through engaging more people into reuse. From our interviews and observations, we find that household items in fair condition are thrown away and unused items are often forgotten in hidden corners. Besides, advertising and marketing strategies encourage people to buy new items. This results in low use of products and high demand for new ones, leading to increased manufacturing to meet people's needs. Manufacturing unavoidably consumes natural resources, emits carbon, pollutes the environment, and affects climate. We designed eXchangeFun to facilitate community-based reuse in order to slow down consumption. The eXchangeFun provides opportunities for people to discover items through the experience of treasure hunting. The seller's wish list reminds people to trade unused items. Additionally, eXchangeFun allows people to post multiple items easily by tagging them in one picture. To encourage renewal and repurposing of items, the As-Is page encourage people to post items with defects. Building upon the trust and feeling of closeness that people have for their community, the design creates more opportunities for reuse. By reducing the disposal of useful items, less trash goes into the landfills and the demand for manufacturing is decreased. If we can maximize the lifespan of items and encourage a culture of reuse and exchange in our communities, we can take a small step towards maintaining environmental sustainability.

Question: Technology/Software Used:
Answer: During our design process, we have used a range of Microsoft products to generate higher fidelity prototypes. These products include Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Microsoft Powerpoint. We developed our final working prototype using WPF, Expression Blend and Design.

Question: Inspiration: What inspired your team to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup and why did you choose the Design competition?
Answer: As designers, we are interested in designing interactions and experience to improve people's lives. In the past, both of us have been working on design projects about promoting sustainability. From our experience, we realized environmental sustainability is an important problem. Imagine Cup provides the technology, opportunities, and learning communities for us to work on this issue.

Question: Team History: How did your team meet?
Answer: We met through the Human-Computer Interaction Design master program at Indiana University. We started off with the idea of collecting an inventory of technologies in public space using cameras and got interested into exploring people-people interactions through technology.

Question: Team Experience: What experience did your team have with Design before competing in the Imagine Cup?
Answer: We have done many design projects through various courses in HCI/design program. Feixing was a member in the Indiana University Sustainable Interaction Research Group lead by Professor Eli Blevis. In the group, she was involved in a design project to promote Premaculture and Urban Farming. Yujia is in Everyday Computing Research Group led by Professor Shaowen Bardzell. This group focuses on HCI design in everyday life, especially in domestic space.

Question: Highlights: What has been the best part of the Imagine Cup competition to date?
Answer: Being able to immerse into people's real life to explore how we consume in everyday life. Trying to explain design in the simplest terms, in 2 minutes video and limited words.

Question: Inspiration: How did your team come up with your submission? Include which Millennium Development Goal inspired your solution.
Answer: We were inspired by the Millenium Development Goal of Environmental Sustainability. It is tough to get people act sustainably because more efforts, more money, and strong determinations are often needed to make sustainable choice over the others. Instead of preaching sustainability, our approach to slow down consumption is to find a win-win solution to meet both people's needs and sustainable goal. We were encouraged by certain sustainable consumption behaviors like trading and repurposing used items. These reuse behaviors benefits people's lives by helping to find things they want for a cheaper price. However, these local reuse activities are not well facilitated by current solutions such as Craigslist or community bulletin boards. Thus we have designed eXchangeFun, a platform to facilitate the trade and exchange of household items within a community.

Question: Challenges: What personal or technological challenges did your team face while developing your submission?
Answer: It is very challenging to learn new softwares and develop working prototypes with them in a relatively short time.

Question: Future Plans: What does your team plan on doing after the Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt? Do you plan to use your project to launch a new business?
Answer: Yes. We are planning to work on the strategic plan of eXchangeFun and start implementing it in local communities.