A working demo is available here, no luck with getting more prescient features like:
At least the clock counts up though? Eh?
My design problem was as follows: Find a way to reuse older computers. Many people in the US either have a lot of these laying around or just throw their old technology away once it stops working for them. I'd like to reduce this waste, so began brainstorming some ways to reuse this old technology. An idea I had for laptops especially was using them as an alarm clock when they get old. Hence, my demo. This should work on pretty much any browser that has Javascript, which is most. If I had more time I probably would have designed a PHP backend that would have needed some more planning on the user's end, perhaps an application that would install instead of being a single HTML file.
There really isn't much to testing this prototype, watch the clock count up, press the "submit" button for a funny noise. It's all pretty basic. For the next iteration, if I pursue it, I'd like to implement the features I listed above. In addition to that, I'd also like to change the backend so it can run pretty much anywhere.
This project pretty easily meets the theme of Sustainable Design because it reuses old technology to be useful today.
My thinking hasn't really changed all that much. I've been designing and deploying web applications and sites for the better part of 2 years, and I like to think I've built up a competency at it during that time. I haven't worked on anything approaching a commercial product, but everything I work on has been designed with efficiency (and therefore sustainability) in mind.
That being said, I would have probably spent a little more time on this prototype, I only really spent 1-1.5 hours on it. Most of that was designing the CSS so it'd look nice. If I were to do this again I'd start ground-up with a PHP or other CGI scripting language instead of using Javascript for every functionality, as I'm much more comfortable with server-side programming than client-side.