shaun strack

work      play      about

Trash Panda

Creative Direction
Design
Prototyping
Vibe-Coded prototype

The current "free" market is a digital graveyard of dead links and social friction. Current platforms for exchanging useful, but unwanted, items comes with social friction, time-sucks of endless scrolling, ignored “still available” emails, and general algorithmic noise that slow down the exchange of good.  All this while the street is a living, high-speed resource.
TrashPanda bridges the gap between the sidewalk and the seeker, turning a race against the garbage truck into a real-time, zero-friction treasure hunt.



The curb provides


The obvious way to navigate all the street gold out there is via geo-targeted post. But stopping there leaves a lot to chance.

One simple, user-provided, piece of data to help is a timestamp on each post. This starts the 24-hour health bar of the item which is also mirrored in each posts pin color. But, as the system learns from people “nabbing” items it can gradually adapt health bars for certain items based on how quickly they seem to be picked up.

Trash Panda also scrapes municipal sites and plots garbage pickup zones in the area throughout the week. So users can prioritize which neighborhoods to canvas.

See what’s good in 
your neighborhood



Further mimicking online shopping, or marketplace, there is a feed-style view. Here users can sort based on age or proximity. This overview allows for quicker scannable browsing for certain items.

No, there’s no search. 
Why? Because where’s the sport in that?

In the detail view users can flip through posts as easily as potential bad dates on Tinder. Each post gives a more detailed health bar ticking down before th post disappears, or garbage day clears a zone.

Users can also get directions to the tag using coordinates, or What3Words locations, so addresses are never posted.


Contribute to 
the curb-harvest


Whether it’s your own curb alert, or a nice pile of post-garage sale goodies down the block, users can simply and quickly post finds to Trash Panda.

A brief title and optional description are all that are needed for Trash Panda to post and tag an items location. Users can also opt for an AI descriptor to help detail what’s in the photo.
\ prev\      /next /