Smart Recycle Bin System
Overview
Smart recycle is a recycling system designed to tackle the confusing recycling rules across different cities, states and geos. It including a interactive display, a camera and the bins. The display is where all the interaction happens. It tells user if an obeject is recyclable or not. It also tells how to process an recyclable such as rinse and clean a plastic bottle before is goes into the bin.
Duration
July 2019 - September 2019
Category
service design
UX design
UX tools
value proposition, user journey map
Background
Problem Statement
Due to wrong beliefs (misconceptions, aspirational recycling, etc.), sorting out trash from the recycle bins takes lots of money and energy.
Design Opportunity
A design that can sort trash out before they are dumped would be helpful.
Potentially used technology: AI image recognition
Recycle Statistics
To make things easy, many cities in the US have adopted a way of recycling called single-stream recycling. Basically it means put every recyclable—paper, plastic, metal into one single recycle bin instead of the traditional multi-stream recycling (every kind of recyclable has its own bin to go). By 2014, 80% of the US cities have used this way to do recycling. This simplicity has brought another problem though. The average contamination rate (rate of unrecyclable in recycle bins) is rocketing year by year. However, to sort these unrecyclables out takes complex precedures and infavorable amount of money. In fact, simply throwing the whole block of trash away will be more economically sensible than sorting things out. Here are a few important numbers to notice.
Research
Secondary research
How recycling works in MRFs
MRF, or materials recycling facility, is a specialized plant that receives, separates, and prepares recyclable materials for marketing to end-user manufacturers. In more advanced MRFs, many sorting works are finished by machine. However, they still need a lot of human efforts to thoroughly sort out, pick up, clean recyclables.
Primary research: Survey
This survey is finished by 57 participants. 26 participants are male, while 31 are female. Most (87%) of them are aged 18-24 with a high degree (bachelor’s or above: 93%). With this demographic in mind, they “are supposed to” be more environmentally aware.
key take-aways
Only a quarter of the participants do recycling, and that’s mainly because of the lack of recycling knowledge and all the mess inside the recycle bin.
Half of those who do recycling are confident that they can do recycle right while in truth 9 out of 13 wrongly believe coffee cup can be recycled. In general, only 1/4 of participants get the small test right.
Primary Research: Observation
It is not a rare case that people’s behaviors contradict with people’s words. Observation can helps to narrow down the gap. In order to really understand people’s recycling behaviors, I spend a whole day besides recycle bins in my neighborhood, besides bus stop and inside shopping mall, observing how people throw away a garbage, how dustman sort things out and what’s really inside the bins. Here are a few picture ducumenting this observation.
Research Insights
With a combination of secondary and primary research, I framed 5 essential insights. These insights are some very abstract ideas of the behaviors, principles and systems of the real world I have researched.
Ideation
Persona & User Journey Map
A typical user of this smart recycling system could be a young coder. He is concered about the environment. He would read global warming reports, watch environment protecting ducumentaries and use cloth bag instead of plastic ones. Despite being environmentally aware, he finds it confusing to do recycing. Here is his basic info and the journey he takes from buying a coffee to dumping it into the bin.
Design Concepts
Based on opportunities framed from user journey map and research insights, I focused my design on the following 3 concepts.
User Flow
This system includes a standing screen for interation, a camera for AI-empowered object recognition and the bins. The recycling process goes like this: user get in front of the screen and camera to get the garbage recognized. The system will inform user if the garbage is recyclable or not and if it need further processing. After finishing the processing (if any), user put the garbage in the bins accordingly.
Final Design
Use Scenario & UI overview
Take a look at how the system looks.
Different from smart-phone screens, standing screen is way bigger and unportable. The UI I made are caterd for this characteristic. Important infomation should be displayed at the upper part of the screen since it’s where our eyes are. Morever, buttons are designed within arm reach so that users can interact with the UI in a more intuitive and natural way.
