Upkeep was another project for the branding class that I took while I was at Grand Valley State University where it was assigned as a group project. For this project, we had to work together to think of a concept for an new brand from scratch. My group’s mindset was immediately thinking of the audience of the college campuses, and talking through what problems a lot of these students face during there time living on campus or off campus nearby.

As we continued discussing what kinds of problems students face we came to an agreement in wanting to develop and design an app that helped students who live together keep their living space that they share clean year round. This is an idea that would be a way for roommates to communicate with each other in a competitive way to make sure that cleaning around the apartment gets done in order to avoid the unsettling comments that can occur when there are disagreements about certain cleaning not being done when originally asked.

Our way of accomplishing this was designing an app named Upkeep, that would allow roommates to keep track of what is getting done around the apartment while also making cleaning a competitive game. This competitive aspect that we have introduced into this app is way to take something that seems like a chore to a lot of students, and something that they always seem to push aside and worry about later. How it would work is that there are a list of daily tasks for everyone to complete not only for themselves, but for everyone else that lives there. There is a leaderboard that keeps track of the daily tasks that are being completed by each person living inside the space, and tracks this data for a month until restarting for the next month. With each month coming to an end the person who finishes at the top of the leaderboard is rewarded a gift card of $15-20. Along with this gift card they will also receive in game rewards to help decorate their virtual room.