The Problem
There’s plenty we could do to combat waste, but where does one actually start? Walking past mountains of trash on New York City street lead us to question: how might we design a simple intervention that could inspire New Yorkers to be a little more conscious of the waste they produced?
Role
This project was completed with Alex Todaro, Mini Kim, and Adam Norbury.
Working in a four person team, we researched user behaviors around waste, and strategized a suite of educational interventions around recycling behavior. The research and strategy was done as a team, I was responsible for the design of this game as one piece of our intervention strategy.
Process
We developed the project with a lot of research and experimentation into the waste behaviors of the studio, as well as ourselves, with small prototypes, interviews, and diary studies of our own behavior (challenging ourselves to track every bit of trash we produced.)
Though the challenges of waste is a systemic problem, we ended up focusing in on the area we could control, which was individual behavior and awareness.
Insights
Our key insights were:
- Recycling rules are confusing and seem complex, and when forced to think through what they should or shouldn’t be recycling, people tended to take the easiest path and just bin everything.
- Recycling was seen as a chore, something people aspired to do, but didn’t always follow through.
These insights, combined with the fact that we spent a lot of time of the New York subway killing time on our phones lead us to wonder: was there an easy way to get people to understand the rules of recycling, so it became both fun and second nature?
The Solution
The Conveyor is an educational app that takes advantage of game mechanics in order to teach it’s users about recycling. As items come down the conveyor belt, the user sorts them into paper, plastic, or glass, or lets them continue into the trash. As the game progresses, the pieces get more complex, increasing the challenge of the game as the user learns the nuances of the city’s recycling rules.
