Sustentabilidade e abordagem de design centrada nos usuários: aplicativo móvel para o estímulo do uso responsável da água por usuários residenciais

Abstract

This paper presents the research project and development of concept and graphic interface of a mobile application to encourage the responsible use of water between users of the public water system. Thus, in order to guide the sustainable consumption habits through an appropriate and efficient elucidative approach, the author used research tools generally used in the practices of human centered design (HCD) during the identification process of needs, opportunities and interface development. These steps covered several interviews with the actors involved in the issue (users, professionals of environmental education and other employees), tests and experiments. For this, there was support in concepts and design guidelines for interaction and sustainability from a bibliographical study. All this provided the generation of coherent alternatives to the sociocultural context of the public, which was delimited to young people between 18 and 30 years of classes A, B and C (according to brazilian socioeconomic classification). The description of all this exploratory process is a fundamental part of the scope of this document. The proposed application is characterized as a music player called "Chuá", which aims to clarify young people about their own consumption needs for a bath. Basically, the application allows the user to know the volume of spent water from the development of a playlist to play during such activity. To do so, the system relates the duration of the audio tracks saved in the virtual library of device with the specific user shower flow. The software also provide notifications and alerts as over-consumption in the end and during the bath, always in a playful, simple and direct way. In addition, other interaction screens were developed for a individual monitoring of performance in relation to efforts to avoid waste, such as consumption history, profile and rankings.