The aim of my master thesis was to find ways for supporting a sustainable lifestyle with interaction design. I decided to create the concept for a browser extension, which is supposed to help making more sustainable and healthy decisions while shopping online.

Although the thesis was finished in June 2018, the project is being continued afterwards. The next step is to find supporters, that help to finance the development of a sustainable product search engine. We want to help people to find more sustainable and healthy products online, as well as rethink consumerism and hopefully find better alternatives.

A browser extension has to be installed and shows up as an icon in the browser toolbar afterwards. Browser extensions are able to extend the browser content and change the look and functions of a website.

When the user is searching something in an online shop now, the extension reads the search term of the user and shows informations and alternatives to the searched product. These will be displayed in registry tabs on the right side of the browser. The user can open any tab to show one of the four different categories.

The informations come in form of media articles, which are linked. They either refer to some products positive, neutral or negative.
Different filters can be applied to sort the results and get a quick conclusion. The filters include four topics (health, animal rights, human rights and conservation). The user can choose, if he wants to see positive, neutral or negative results to the certain topic.

The second category gives suggestions, which alternative products can be bought and are more sustainable. These products are linked through "tags" with the media articles from the first category, so the user can inform himself about these products as well.

Sometimes there are products that can be easy assembled by yourself. It is more personal, environmental friendly and you'll probably even save money. This registry tab shows you instructions, how products can be made by yourself.

A webcrawler searches on a second-hand product-plattform for your searchterm and shows you the results in the fourth registry tab. The most environmental friendly product is a used product that you offer a second life.

Except the content from the "second-hand" category, all the other content in the extension should be gathered by the users, too. For this, there is another function. When the user is on a website with content he want to provide for the user community, he has to click the browser icon to save the page. Media articles, instructions and alternative products can be saved. The user also has to choose some tag words, which determine on which product search term the article will be found. Through the tags, the entries should also be connected all over the data bank.

Master Thesis
Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal
Institute for Industrial Design

Degree course:
Master Interaction Design

Supervision:
Prof. Dominik Schumacher
Robin Hädicke

Special thanks for supporting me with prototyping and development goes to:
Kristin Fritsch