The Impact Bin
Ever wonder how much you throw out? Wanna now much can composting help the environment?
These were the questions that guided my team and me in our final project for my IAT 235 (Information Design) project. The project was simple: Metro Vancouver has implemented mandatory composting in each household, how can you get people to do it? There were three components to the project: a physical offline approach, an online approach, and a presentation to people who actually worked for the City of Vancouver. Our target audience was directed to citizens who lived in Multi-Unit Residential Buildings (MURBs).
We wanted our online to relate back to our offline heavily. We also thought about the fact that maybe people already know about composting and maybe it more about how do we engage them. We thought about hosting events, brochures and booklets, and posters. Unfortunately, none would even motivate ourselves to do it. Then one member said, "why not just make a better bin?" And then we thought, why not make a bin that would tell you how much you were composting each time you put something in it?
We developed that idea and asked the question of what if you could compare yourself to other neighborhoods or buildings? Our bins would be able to calculate how much CO2 emissions people were saving through weighing the amount that they composted. Next, that information would be sent to our online platform. There, people would be able to track what they've composted. They could also see how other neighborhoods were doing as well as resources such as posters to be better composters. Building managers would have the opportunity to log in and track metrics on how their building(s) were doing, order more bins, or schedule maintenance. We quickly scribbled some initial designs and measurements and one group member started on the renders. In the meantime, I worked on our presentation and physical version of the bin while the other worked on the website.
Through talking to our professor and our TA, we realized that our bins still needed a way to teach people to compost. We ended up adding in a poster that I had made for an earlier project in that class.
Finally putting it all together was great, everything looked exactly the way we had wanted. Our physical bin needed to a little bit smaller due to feasibility in making it and transportation to class. Through JavaScript, our site was able to show what it would look like if we got real time data.
