Students win Futurethon with site for eco-friendly lawns


A team of four students took home first place in this year’s Saving Water Futurethon event with “Terracotta,” a website aimed at helping homeowners design and create their own eco-friendly lawn.

The 48-hour event, hosted by USC, Deutsch, Hack for L.A., the City of Los Angeles and Global Shapers, was held June 6-7.  Thirty students from USC came together with 30 professionals to discover new and innovative ways to deal with the California drought, which is now entering its fourth year.

Spring graduates Camille Kanengiser, Max Pittsley and Catherine Chooljian, along with 2014 graduate Mehrdad Mahdavi, made up the team responsible for the prize-winning website design.

“We had a very diverse team with Camille and Catherine coming from the art side and Mehrdad coming from the engineering side and myself having business experience,” Pittsley said. “That really made it easy to partition the duties.”

Using supplementary information from Google Maps, Terracotta formulates a visual model of a lawn design based on soil type and the elevation of the home along with the various aesthetic wishes of the user.

“With the drought, there’s so much research that a person has to do that no one has time for,” Pittsley said. “We spent a 48-hour weekend working with some of the top experts in the field, and we feel like we just barely scratched the surface. The idea is to make that information accessible to everyone.”

Two of the experts that the team worked closely with are Claire Latane and Margot Jacobs of Mia Lehrer + Associates. The two inspired the team to create the website due to the spread of misinformation about what constitutes an eco-friendly lawn.

“Talking to them was great because they mentioned how people who rip out their lawns and place native plants weren’t actually solving the problem — just diverting it into another problem,” Kanengiser said. “Grass serves a purpose but there are different types of grass that will save people in the long run and still be aesthetically pleasing.”

Homeowners who pulled out their lawns without replacing it with another form of foliage could contribute to “urban island heating effect” as grass has a natural ability to act as a light reflection device.

“Urban heating occurs when light that isn’t used by plants for energy are not reflected back up,” Kanengiser said. “It heats up urban environments.”

Kanengiser and Pittsley, who have worked together on “ElemenTerra,” a virtual reality game, said their interactive media background played a large role in the way their team decided to inform homeowners. The design for Terracotta’s website was influenced by game design principles that focused on usability and entertainment as an educational tool.

“Considering things from the player’s perspective — motivation and ease of use and iteration — all of that was really core to the way that we went about building our design,” Pittsley said.

Kanengiser and Pittsley both expressed concern over the fact that information about the drought, though readily available, was difficult for people to obtain.

“There is a lot of information from a lot of sources,” Kanengiser said. “Most people simply don’t have the time and energy to go through all of it. If you’re working more than one job or are a student or perhaps raising a family, it simply won’t happen.”

Pittsley said that this was the key problem they planned to address with their design.

“That’s why we wanted to make Terracotta interactive,” Pittsley added. “We’re trying to make things more specific and topical.”

With their first prize win, the four students have received summer fellowship opportunities to continue work on their project at USC. In addition, Pittsley and Kanengiser offered advice to students who are interested in joining the fight against water waste.

“Be knowledgeable. Get involved. And be creative with it,” Kanengiser said. “If someone has a really fun, creative idea and needs a developer or artist, USC is a great place to find those resources to make it happen. There are mentors and teachers that are eager to help.”