Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

EcoFriends: Becoming Friendlier With The Environment

Social media effectively raises environmental awareness in youth, but it struggles to inspire consistent and sustainable actions. Our product, EcoFriends, introduces user-friendly sustainable habits for young adults, aiming to demystify sustainable living. Our website contains short videos that offer reliable information and relatable content, showcasing easy integration of sustainability into daily life. Our primary target is the 18-25 age group, being the largest social media demographic, they have the most significant stake on conservation efforts. Empowering them with actionable steps can harness their potential to make a lasting impact on wildlife conservation and environmental sustainability.

EcoMotive: Your Guide to Electric and Hybrid Vehicles

EcoMotive is a web application designed to address the growing issue of carbon emissions caused by private passenger vehicles. In the United States, the transportation sector is responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, making it the nation’s largest contributor. Our aim is to promote sustainable transportation options to empower consumers to reduce the environmental impact of their commutes. EcoMotive provides users with high quality and personalized information about electric and hybrid vehicles and serves as a valuable resource and personal learning guide for users, enabling them to make informed decisions when searching for their next car.

EmpowerDesign: Fostering Creative Careers with CC4D

The Career Center for Designers (CC4D) is a platform designed by Pixel Pioneers to empower all designers at every stage of their career journey. This self-paced program is tailored to help individuals recognize their unique value in the design realm, fostering confidence and professional growth. Through strategic marketing initiatives, including website prototypes, AB testing, and targeted social media campaigns, we're committed to making CC4D accessible to all. By providing clear pathways and invaluable resources, we're excited to guide aspiring designers toward fulfilling careers in design, driving positive change in the industry one creative at a time.

Empowering Decision-Making for Legal Aid Nonprofit: Sound Legal Aid's Data-Driven Dashboard to Serve Marginalized Communities

Sound Legal Aid, nonprofit volunteer organization based in Olympia, Washington, offers free legal assistance in tenant services, family law, and support for domestic violence survivors. Catering to marginalized communities, SLA serves individuals facing poverty and housing instability. The organization struggles with streamlined data presentation due to limited technological expertise. To address this, the Capstone team created a comprehensive dashboard application integrating data from their client and case databases, offering user-friendly and customizable visualizations to facilitate real-time reporting and decision-making for improved efficiency. The use of the dashboard facilitates cohesive ‘storytelling’, enhancing efforts in grant applications and engagement with news sources.

Epic Developer Community Metadata Alignment and Manager

Currently, migration to the new Epic Developer Community platform is underway and the current metadata management system and list are not effective for technical writers.Our project aims to create scalable and intuitive designs for the convenient and efficient application of metadata and the effective management of that metadata. Our projected future state includes compiling a complete set of metadata terminology, prototyping metadata application in the new EDC Authoring tool, and prototyping a new metadata manager through a novel platform.

ERRS Archival Project: Phase One (2023-2024)

WTBBL ran the Evergreen Radio Reading Service (ERRS) from 1973 to 2011 for the blind and print disabled, with hundreds of media in the collection in danger of being lost due to general obsolescence and material degradation. In this phase of preservation, our team created an inventory of all 2,497 items. This helps understand the content in the collection, and the digital preservation project presents a storage solution for physical assets to ensure long-term access. This is the first step to digitally preserving a significant part of history of WTBBL, independent radio, and the print-disabled community in the Pacific Northwest.

Eventful: Make Your Life More Eventful

Many international students struggle with mental health issues like social isolation, depression, and anxiety. A Penn State study revealed that from 2018 to 2021, these students experienced social isolation 2.5% more frequently than their peers, mainly due to the challenges of adapting to a new country and culture. To tackle this issue, our team developed "Eventful," an app to help international students at the University of Washington integrate into their new community. This innovative, map-based platform enables users to discover nearby events tailored to their interests, fostering connections and creating a supportive environment that brings together the international university community.

Fashion Footprint

Fashion Footprint is a Chrome Extension that addresses the information gap in fashion sustainability influenced by YouTube content. Our project provides real-time sustainability scores for clothing items featured in fashion-related YouTube videos. By scraping and analyzing data from sustainability rating platforms and combining existing scores, we offer transparent insights into brand practices and material compositions. Our results show that brands frequently mentioned in YouTube videos often have poor sustainability ratings. By highlighting these issues, our project empowers consumers to reflect on their purchasing habits and make more informed, eco-friendly decisions and aims to reduce overconsumption driven by influencers on YouTube.

Flair-It, Reddit Flair classification

Our project addresses the problem of manual flair assignment on Reddit, which can be confusing for users and unintuitive for information retrieval. By applying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we developed "Flair-It," a tool that automates flaring for posts. Our main model, RoBERTa, achieved a 59% accuracy rate, outperforming simpler models like Multinomial Naive Bayes (54%), Logistic Regression (53%), and SVM Classifier (53%). This automation streamlines subreddit navigation, helping users find relevant posts more easily and reducing the likelihood of mis-flaring. Ultimately, our project enhances the user experience on Reddit, making it more accessible and user-friendly.

Folksonomy in Fanfiction: A Catalog of Our Own

I developed a seminar that teaches undergraduate students, specifically English majors, about a newer form of cataloging in a way that negates the need for any prior knowledge about cataloging. My seminar takes a look at the folksonomy created and maintained in the popular fanfiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) and how it is different from other forms of cataloging. I do this in part by emphasizing the difference between folksonomies and taxonomies and by comparing the AO3 folksonomy to the library of congress subject headings (LCSH). This seminar is able to be taught anywhere at any time.

iSchool Capstone

2024