Unearth: Making Biodiversity Visible, One Walk at a Time
2025 Climate Change-Makers Challenge -Finalist
Overview
Unearth is an interactive, location-based game that encourages university students to discover the often-overlooked biodiversity across their campus. By transforming casual walks into moments of exploration and reflection, Unearth invites users to notice, document, and engage with local flora and fauna—deepening their connection to nature and contributing to ongoing environmental research.
Created in response to the 2025 Climate Change-Makers Challenge, Unearth was selected as a finalist. Our solution addressed the pillars of biodiversity and capacity building by helping students develop awareness of environmental rhythms, while contributing meaningful data through everyday interaction.
Watch our demo!
My Role
UX Designer, Design Lead - Design research, prototyping, concept development, visual design,
Team
Chen Tong
Lucy Lu
Dorothy Zhou
Timeline
48 hours
Inspiration
Unearth began with a quiet but powerful moment: a class nature walk that veered off the usual path. Our professor pointed out a cluster of early blooms—flowers that now emerged weeks ahead of their typical season. What once signaled spring had become a quiet alarm. That experience made us realize how easy it is to overlook the subtle shifts in nature that reflect larger changes in our climate. Unearth is rooted in this spirit of paying attention.
The Challenge
How might we help students become more aware of environmental change by encouraging deeper interaction with their everyday surroundings?
Our user research revealed a clear problem: students are often too busy or overwhelmed to engage meaningfully with nature, even though many expressed interest in biodiversity and climate issues. Existing platforms either felt too academic, too passive, or failed to build lasting engagement.
Our Approach
We aimed to create a tool that:
Encourages movement and outdoor exploration
Sparks curiosity through discovery and gamification
Creates emotional and scientific value by connecting users with real biodiversity data
The Solution: Unearth
Unearth turns campus exploration into a playful environmental mission. As users walk through their campus, they discover hidden flora and fauna and photograph their findings. These discoveries unlock “Earthlings”—whimsical collectible characters tied to specific species and environmental themes. Each collected Earthling populates a user’s digital garden, a visual archive of their growing relationship with the natural world.
But Unearth is more than a game.
Every observation also contributes to a shared biodiversity database used by researchers in ecology, geology, and environmental studies. Students not only learn but help detect patterns in growth cycles, migratory behaviors, and signs of climate change—becoming active contributors to environmental knowledge.
Key Features
Exploration-Based Discovery: Encourages users to move through and observe their campus environment
Photo-Driven Contributions: Users capture organisms to unlock Earthlings and add to the biodiversity archive
Personal Garden: A growing collection of discovered Earthlings and environmental facts
Community Observation Map: View patterns and entries made by others, fostering collaborative awareness
Time-Based Tracking: Enables users (and researchers) to observe how biodiversity shifts over weeks, seasons, and years
Design Process
Research & Insights
We began by interviewing university students and analyzing existing environmental engagement tools. Our key insight: many students want to connect with nature, but struggle to make time for it. Environmental awareness needed to feel integrated into their routine, not an additional task.
Gamification & Engagement
To respond to motivational gaps, we turned to gamification—a strategy that allowed us to reframe nature walks as personal challenges and moments of discovery. This made biodiversity feel less abstract and more tangible.
Design & Prototyping
Using Figma, we mapped user flows and prototyped interface elements. I contributed to the creation of interaction models and core layouts, ensuring visual clarity and intuitive engagement. Our aesthetic borrowed from natural textures and organic color palettes to reinforce a sense of calm and wonder.
We also used Rhino3D to create immersive perspective graphics and developed our Earthlings and visual storytelling with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Reflection & Future Steps
This project highlighted the power of interactive design in changing perception. By merging digital tools with outdoor exploration, we created an experience that invites users to engage with biodiversity in a deeper, more meaningful way.
Unearth doesn’t ask users to go out of their way—it simply asks them to notice.
Next, we hope to:
Conduct expanded user testing across multiple campuses
Build a functional MVP that includes camera integration and GPS mapping
Partner with campus environmental groups to deploy Unearth as a long-term educational tool
What We’re Proud Of
As a team of first-time hackathon participants, we’re proud of:
Building a complete and well-designed prototype in a short timeframe
Combining our diverse backgrounds—from architecture to the humanities—to create something unique
Staying focused on creating a solution that’s both playful and purposeful
Our greatest achievement was building an experience that transforms routine into ritual, helping students connect with the living systems around them—and contribute to the bigger picture of environmental change.
