Quick access through: https://ruoyuwang.shinyapps.io/GreenFootprint/
GreenFootprint is created under the inspiration to communicate the environmental effects caused by the most basic daily activities for everyone. This idea first came to both of us during our undergraduate study of global environmental change. Though an individual's carbon footprint is not as significant as that of the industry, there are ways we can choose to live a greener lifestyle which benefits our health and the environment.
In this way, GreenFootprint is born.
We built the web app using the Shiny package in R, an interactive web app building tool. Though we have used R and Rstudio in class as a statistic tool, we both have little knowledge of how it can be used to create an app. We struggled on how to build a fitted panel layout and an aesthetic theme. We figured out how to wrangling with a reactive data frame in the server and use that to generate plot, text, and table outputs. We both spent hours trying to create the most user-friendly interface and have all the information clearly explained.
However, the most difficult part is not how to write the code because Shiny is friendly to beginners. Figuring out how to make our inspiration into something easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-be-inspired is way more difficult. We discussed the choices of daily activities that are easy for people to measure and won't be messed with public usage. We struggled on how to estimate the transportation emission in a way as practical as possible for everyone. We played with the data gathered online, very hard. We made little twists while estimating the global distribution of individual CO2 emissions.
The outcome is sweet, though "slightly" different from what we expected. We weren't able to draw a tree using the emission data or track users' carbon emission through time. But we believe GreenFootprint is powerful enough to encourage people to understand their daily environmental impacts and rethink what they have been doing every day. If you like our story and believe you can make the world a little greener, why not give it a try!