The Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Education are lending support for students in 4th through 6th grades to clean up open spaces in Israel. The ministries are providing NIS 13 million for the day-long activities, which will take place April 2, 2019 - Israel's National Cleanup Day.
The new app, dubbed 'AiR' offers incentives to Tel Avivians who adopt environmentally-friendly habits in an augmented reality application by performing specific tasks to accumulate rewards – such as a free coffee and other such perks – redeemable at local businesses.
The 60 students, from multi-disciplinary backgrounds, and the creative professionals were divided into groups and were given a challenge to explore the social and cultural fabric of Tel Aviv’s urban environment using data, technology, design, and business strategy. Each team tackled one theme of a five-pronged brief: 'Talk with the City', 'Move Around the City', 'Chill in the City', 'Breathe in the City' and 'Die in the City'. AiR was created in response to the topic, 'Breathe in the City', and the collaboraters who worked on it included: Alana Lipson, Shaine Leibowitz, Mikaela Brown, Mark O'Looney, Miakel Williams, Danit Acker, Yossi Abodi, Yamit Haddad, and Samuel Regev.
This ideation sprint was staged by MindState, a platform created by two academics, Tamar Many, from Shenkar College of Engineering and Design and Henk van Assen, from Yale, to explore how changing mindsets can lead to global change. Their methodology is based on pooling students from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines together with creative minds to work collaboratively in short sprints to solve challenges, develop thoughts and ideas and ultimately bring about change.