The non-profit organization Forest to Furniture promotes good Forest Stewardship practices and works to connect together the chain of people involved in woodworking, including Land Owners, Sawyers, Truck Drivers, Woodworkers and Clients. People need a website to connect. The website serves three goals: to be accessible to clients, to connect members of the woodworking industry together and to inform the greater public. This website includes an information page, a page of partners and a blog to highlight different stewardship practices in the philosophy of Forest to Furniture. The purchaser gets to know the story of their furniture- the land it came from, the age of the tree, the hands it touched. Forest to Furniture adds value to the otherwise mundane task of selecting furniture by empowering people to recognize that their choice in furniture is about more than just the furniture- it’s a vote for the process that created it.

Research and professional journals confirm micro and small businesses lead the way in Web 2.0 adoption. Although these businesses “are increasingly using social media technologies as part of their business activities… [it is] often as a supplemental promotional tool and without any clear idea of how to measure performance” (Atanassova & Clark, 2015). Many lack a strategic plan guiding their social media practices in a manner supporting their overall mission and goals. The barriers creating these gaps are often identified as lacking time, budget, and technology skills. Knowledge barriers include a limited awareness of information resources, software and platform features, implementation strategies, and best practices for user engagement and interface design. Our workshops help business owners overcome these barriers by providing a methodical approach, information resources, and analytic training with the goal of integrating social media as a tool into their overall business plan.

The fitness industry is currently worth $27 billion, and has grown less than 2% over the last 5 years. Gyms have abysmal retention rates ranging from 40-70%, and spend nearly 9 times as much in acquisition costs. At the same time, more than 200 million Americans today are considered overweight. How is a growing problem not matched by an industry specifically designed to solve it? Because people fall into the TRIBE – Time, Results, Interest, Body Image and Energy, the top five excuses for not working out. Gymfluence uses habit-centered design techniques to help people mitigate the TRIBE. We analyze user behavior, anticipate excuses, inform gym staff and enable the staff to influence users through data and a positive reward cycle. Additionally, we help users document their commitment to their personal wellbeing. And the kicker? Half our app can only be opened inside the gym!

The UW has a variety of mentoring programs available to students but each is implemented in their own way without a standard platform for matching mentors with mentees. This can hinder the mentoring process by creating difficulty for mentors and mentees to match up. Our website will standardize the mentoring matching process and allows mentors and mentees to find their ideal match in a more simpler way. We believe this will encourage and increase mentoring at the UW which means more lives will be improved.

Expensive housing prices and the desire to get out of their family homes are pushing more and more young adults to share housing with other tenants. However, group housing comes with its own heap of problems. Neglected chores, unpaid debts, and unhelpful roommates all combine to heavily strain relationships between tenants and complicate what should be the most comfortable part of our lives. OneRoof solves these complexities of group housing by directly targeting the two roots of the problem: disorganized communication and lack of accountability. Our solution features flexible task creation, and neatly organizes tasks both made by and assigned to you in one simple feed. Tenants are able to remind and keep track of their roommates’ tasks, and verify that they have been completed. By providing a tool that promotes clear communication and reliability, we help simplify household responsibilities and open up more time for our users’ daily endeavors.

The Puyallup Public Library serves the citizens of the city of Puyallup in Washington state. They enjoy a youth services department comprised of two children’s librarians and a teen librarian. My project focused on analyzing the current services of the children’s librarians, researching things they could do to improve their services, and offer recommendations based off that research. My analysis indicated potential improvements in marketing and programming evaluation strategies, my research indicated specific marketing strategies and evaluation rubrics that would be applicable, and my recommendations were tailored specifically to the Puyallup Public Library. My research project offers two things primarily to the children’s librarians. Not does it offer recommendations with objectivity realistic marketing strategies, but those recommendations take the personality and unique customer base of the Puyallup library into account. Put another way, my recommendations seek to supplement the children’s services, not replace them.

Spokin is an experimental online civic network created by the non-profit research and development organization, Third Place Technologies. Spokin’s purpose is to allow users to connect with organizations, projects, events and many other happenings that they believe that they are connected to within their communities. This is where our specific capstone project comes into play. Our project is to use a JavaScript visualization library called D3 that will allow us to create a way of visualizing the connection between different people and organizations in the Spokin user network. This will allow their audience to be able find new users and organizations to connect with by looking at how their current connections compare to others.

In collaboration with the Hillsboro Public Library, the information problem is how to craft an extension of the current non-traditional collection – the “Library of Things” – into one of the few tool lending libraries affiliated with a public library affiliated. To solve this problem, I assisted from research on waiver verbiage to targeted marketing and strategic planning. I have been on the ground floor of a new community resource, a part of the origin story of a burgeoning force in public libraries, a pivotal opportunity to provide an innovative, yet essential service. The “Library of Things” is a service model expanding libraries’ lending capabilities beyond books. Public libraries embrace and exemplify this emerging feature of the “sharing economy”. Talk of the sharing economy tends to revolve around flashy startups which disrupt markets. Yet public libraries were sharing before it was cool: lending materials to people who, in some sense, collectively own them yet may not otherwise be able to afford them. The sharing service model evokes a sense of community, resonates with cultivating genuine connections and lasting engagement.

eSports is a rapidly growing industry where competitive online video gaming has reached a whopping 71 million followers. Gaming professionals compete and specialize in certain game genres such as real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, or multiplayer online battle arenas. Gaming professionals have massive followings of fans who idolize their lives. Teaming up with Unikrn, an eSports betting startup in Seattle, we have been working hard at creating a mobile game to target eSports fans to hone their own gaming skills. Unikrn Assist will take hard-tom-aster aspects of competitive games and help fans to improve them anywhere using our mobile app. This app will help fans master their gaming skills in hopes that one day they will be able to become professional gamers.