Defining our target audience

To further understand our target audience of UCSD students we conducted both primary and secondary research. Our primary research consists of standard interviews and our secondary research involved academic papers and articles on the traits of college students. Our standard interviews began with demographic inquiries before moving on to open-ended discussion with these guiding questions in mind:

1. Does cost efficiency matter to you?
2. Is environmental sustainability important to you?
3. What do you know about alternative energy sources?
4. How have you acted to promote sustainability recently?
5. What do you know about algae biofuels?

We interviewed 21 individuals of our target audience - college students between the ages of 18-23, mostly liberal, have a relatively low rate of income, and are highly educated in contrast with the rest of the global population. The majority of our interviewees tended towards technical fields, with 12 engineering majors, 2 computer science majors, 1 environmental systems major and the rest cognitive science majors. Almost all of the targets live in regions in and around San Diego which means that they’ve already been indoctrinated in environment-conscious philosophy which results in a disposition to actively modify behavior for the sake of the environment. 91% of interviewees cared about the environment, 100% cared about cost efficiency and 100% expressed interest in learning more about potentially making their own algae biofuels. Our second round of standard interviews was conducted with 6 cognitive science students (2 Males, 4 Females) during the first prototyping session. We probed for psychographic features by asking 2 general question to prompt creative responses and encourage discussion.

1. What would motivate you to take action towards environmental sustainability? A workshop to attend? A product to buy? A project to undertake?
2. What concerns do you have with making your own biofuels?

The general responses are as followed: “I don’t know enough about it [algae biofuels], it’s bit overwhelming” “I think the biggest problem is approach-ability” Some users liked the idea of purchasing something small or a starter kit to facilitate and motivate the process (2 out of 6 participants) Some users stated that they’d like to learn how to implement the process with ordinary household items (6 out of 6 participants) The results suggested that people concerned about the environment are willing to learn about algae biofuels through workshops or demonstrations and that a change of behavior can also be facilitated through a cheap product or starter kit that they can purchase. These psychographic traits are confirmed by our secondary research. Cirino's article established an imperative and illustrated the importance of climate change education and also provided us with the Plutzer's paper, Climate Confusion Among U.S. Teachers (Cirino). Both of these sources state that most high school graduates going into college have heard of climate change in passing but know only superficial levels of information about it (Plutzer). As we perused through ways in which to integrate interactive education on climate change into college curricula we thought about workshops. Workshops can span varying levels of specialty and skill ranging from something as straightforward as coloring your tote bag to creating your own app and we decided that a workshop would be our method of choice as concurred by Stanger-Halls study on the effectiveness of workshops (Stanger-Hall).