This week was largely about tying down my current project and preparing for a new one. Hotchkiss is underway as we now have around eight schools with student contacts. I opened some new relationships this week but it is a two way street, meaning that I largely depend on them to answer my emails. The real exciting part of this week was my Skype with Mathis! I've been a huge fan of GFN and always imagined wanting to go in that direction of environmental awareness so getting involved with them is like my dream project. In the Skype Mathis explained the three core ideas of GFN and their outreach system and has begun a small project for me to look into. I spent the day looking at how you can reach out to the audience in a way that encourages the common man, or teenager, to have no choice but to look at consuming less as the more "skillful" option. I'll finish commenting on Mathis's papers and get those back to him.
I have one slight idea which I'm not sure if I like yet but could shed a more positive light on the global footprint calculator. GFN is currently trying to transfer the calculator to an app, so what if you make it sort of a progressive quiz? You start with their normal calculator, only far more in depth, and then see your current results as per usual. But then after this you have questions everyday that are something like "How did you get to work today?" or "How many miles away was your dinner or main meal grown?" and then using these questions the app shifts their global footprint (either making it better or worse) to show the person's progress. I like to take inspiration for this from the popular running/active apps, where you record when you take a walk and it shifts your activity level. This could also be extended to the option of what you saved that day. Say for the "How did you get to work today?" question you say that you biked, then it would show you a fact about how you saved on average x amount of money because you didn't spend it on gas or shows you that on average you saved x amount of CO2 today (averages of course). That way the person can see that their little choices day to day are making a difference. You could even go as far as to make a social media aspect in which you can compare your current footprint to your friends.
This idea has downsides of course but this project has got my ideas flowing and this could potentially be a type of direction you could go in to reach out to teenagers (we like technology and apps if you haven't noticed) and also showing how with this information you can make a difference and lower your global footprint one day at a time.
ainslie_j
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