As part of the Humanitarian Engineering Scholars program, my project group was given the task of exploring the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and then finding a way to promote that goal in our daily lives. After some deliberation, the team noticed that because we live in a residence building with hundreds of other students, the goal of Sustainable Cities and Communities was especially relevant to us.

In order to promote sustainability within our building, Torres House, we discussed ways to encourage people to take shorter showers. The lighting in our community restrooms is based on motion sensors, so we explored how we could use lighting to provide visual cues for when a resident has been in the shower for 10 minutes. We hoped this simple switch would encourage the building’s average shower time to reduce by at least 1.5 minutes, which would save around $1,300 and over 800,000 gallons of water per year! We then met with our Hall Director, who is working on discussing the idea with the head of maintenance. In the meantime, the team designed the poster displayed above that we put up near every bathroom in order to promote sustainability through shorter shower times.

This project was important to me because I feel very dedicated to humanitarian engineering and sustainability. Organizing meetings, putting up flyers, and promoting awareness was meaningful to me because it helped to advance my own passions of teamwork, positivity, and conservation.