The Garbage Eaters were created during the summer of 2020 when I participated in a Fab Lab design challenge with the theme Smart Cities in Crisis. The challenge presented me, as a primarily digital designer, with the opportunity to collaborate with engineers and product designers and to join our expertise to create physical products enhanced with a digital service level.
With my experience of service design, I was chosen to lead the project to make sure the general concept, the physical-, and the digital products all worked in a coherent service.
The project was in a quick-n-dirty style with the goal of delivering a conceptual idea and to use different prototyping methods to communicate the idea to potential investors.
My main responsibility in this project, as a project lead of a multi-functional team, was to ensure a good collaboration and a coherency of all parts in the product-service concept.
I did this by making sure that although my team members were divided into smaller teams of different responsibilities we were all constantly working alongside each other, had full team meetings to make critical decisions and kept thorough documentation of what, why and how decisions were made.
The first challenge of the team was to narrow down the scope of the design problem. We worked together using trend analysis, studied literature, and did pre-interviews which led us to our problem space.
This is how we resonated:
Large masses of waste is generated and spread across the globe where much of it end up in landfills and in our oceans. Trends show that individuals are generating more waste per person than before but are becoming more aware of the issues.
Waste materials can be recycled to lower the negative impact. In Sweden, recycling infrastructure is well-developed but despite this individuals recycle less than before.
People don't generally have good reasons not to recycle. Individuals in Sweden lack the sense of purpose in recycling and think its easier not to (learnings from interviews). Simply put: We are lazy. So it is not about educating or improving infrastructure - its about invoking a behavioral change.
It is difficult to change behaviors - easier to influence new ones. Much like its difficult to teach an old dog new tricks it is easier to influence behavior in children. (Additionally, children have shown to be of great influence to their parents too when they start to feel embarrassed that their children are doing better than them...)
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In Sweden, an improved recycling behavior is sought through recycling being part of the curriculum in pre-schools. By choosing to design for this context, children with un-interested parents (whom would'nt buy a recycling product/service to their kids) can be reached in hopes of extending their influence back to their parents.
As this was a quick-n-dirty project we did not have much time to conduct extensive user studies to learn about our context. Neither were they a usual part of my team members' processes. That children were our primary users also made it more difficult.
However, I argued that to design for a specific context we need to know something about it. So I conducted interviews with teachers and principals at pre-schools to get their view on recycling services for children and how a majority of kids could be motivated.
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After the short explorative phase I decided that we should define criteria and model personas as a step in ensuring that we were all working on designing for the same goal and users and to make sure we did not lose track of what we had learned.
As our team was diverse we decided to try generating ideas both individually and collaboratively as some were more focused on the physical, others on the digital, and me - on the service aspects.
I learned that both approaches had their advantages: More creativity and details individually, and a better collective understanding and coherency collaboratively. Through many iterations of both sorts the Garbage Eaters product-service concept was developed.
My second largest responsibility was that I took the lead of visual design and communication. Since the concept was so dependent on the Garbage Eater characters to explain and communicate what the concept was about to children, the design of versatile character illustrations became imperative to our project.
The design of the characters needed to be appropriate for pre-school children and to communicate what material is connected to what character. They also needed to be adjusted to fit the requirements of the garbage bins. I, together with a few design team members, sketched out different ideas which iteratively led to the four first garbage eater characters designs. Then they needed to be refined and digitised.
We decided that I should use Adobe Illustrator because that would later allow me to transfer the illustrations into Character Animator and After Effects, by working with layers and labelling.
Designing for children is never an easy task because it is difficult to get children to imagine and evaluate what they cannot properly see or interact with.
For that reason, we decided to take our illustrations a step further and create a conceptual movie explaining the imagined origin of the garbage eaters and why the children should want to help them by recycling. To do this I used Adobe Character Animator and After Effects to create a quick-n-dirty animated movie clip.
I was in charge of designing the service aspects and the connections between the digital and the physical. Therefore I had to ensure that both the physical and the digital parts had some components (like physical: buttons, sensors, speakers and character placement on lid, etc. and digital: story-telling, sensor connection and both children and teacher views, etc.)
A child approaches the garbage bins with a material. She chooses the garbage bin with the correct character top and presses the button to open the mouth (lid) of the garbage bin. Sensors in the back of the garbage bin registers whether the material was correct for the chosen bin, keeps track of the level of fullness and how much material the children recycle over time. The child gets instant feedback from a speaker on the bin and data is sent to a digital service the pre-school children can access on tablets. The digital service consists of child-friendly infographics, and educational content.
The end of this project was more focused on conceptual refinement for communicational purposes than of evaluation - a step in any design process I believe to be of outmost importance. Since the end of the project I have many times wanted to take it up again and see what actual pre-school children would have to say about the product/service. Perhaps in the future such an opportunity will arise.
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