One person's trash is another person's treasure!
This project is created during the 36-hour DivHacks 2023. We are aiming to build a platform that can facilitate stooping, or the act of shopping for and repurposing discarded furnitures, in urban areas. Technologies used include MERN Stack, Google Maps API, Figma, Git, Yarn.
This web project is meant to be a prototype for our idea. You may find the more complete design for our final product through this figma project. Here is a user flowchart for our project prototype.
When you are in the directory /stoop, run the following commands:
cd api,nodemon index.js. Then, run cd ../client, yarn && yarn dev. Then, you may be able to interact with the web application through localhost:5174.
We recieved our initial inspiration from the instagram account stoopingnyc. Since its creation, the account has attracted over 460K followers and have featured nearly 18K discarded items around NYC. We were very inspired by the idea of stooping as well as the commitment of the account owner.
Therefore, we created this project in hope to add to their effort. Specifically, we know that constantly sorting through private messages and updating the platform can be a lot of work and time consuming. So we decided to build this web application, which we hope can provide more up-to-date, and more easily-accessed information on stooping opportunities. Our end goal is to reduce waste, to promote affordable furniture, to encourage up-cyling trash, and more importantly, to connect and promote the stooping community.
Ideally, the website would allow users to login, search, post, and see map location about stooping opportunities. Our MVP implementation supports the posting and map display feature. We hope to continue improve this project to better serve the community. This not only includes realizing what we have planned in our Figma prototype, but also many more bonus features. Below are the list of ideas that we hope to realize moving forward:
- Receiving constant updates regarding the item's status is important in stooping. We hope to be able to add voting buttons that will allow other users to verify the condition of the item in the post. This way, anyone walking pass the same item may be able to verify the validity of the post's information and update the current status of the item.
- Taking advantage of image-to-text generation AI model as well as keywords entered by users, we can autogenerate a short description for each featured item. This would help us save user's time from synthesizing their own description, thereby making posting a simpler and more convient experience for users.
- Utilizing Google Maps's Places API and Geocoding API to integration autocompletion of addresses and automatic extraction of the address's latitude and longitude.
- Adding a wishlist feature where users can enter in items that they are hoping to find. When an item nearby matches with the user's wishlist, we can notify the user about the stooping opportunity.
- Promoting the stooping community by allowing users to share their stooping experience - good or bad. They may write short posts about their tips and tricks. Or, they may also share photos or videos of how they are able to reutilize the items they stooped, which can offer design guides and inspirations to others.