I presented this work in a Pecha Kucha style presentation on December 8 to my HCDE 419 peers and instructors. Original auto-advancing slide deck here.
In 2009, researchers of the MIT Senseable City Lab created geotags in a project called “Trash Track” that allowed participants to track the location of their discarded garbage items through its entire journey from disposal to final destination (Shepard, 2011). These geosensors served as part of a common vision of a “Sentient City” that talks to its inhabitants, communicating these locations via mobile phone app and public visualizations. The project stirred the emotions of the participants as people grew a sense of care towards where their trash ends up, as well as motivation and awareness of proper disposal processes.
This project extended out of Weiser’s concept of ubiquitous computing, a world where computers fade into the background and exist everywhere and anywhere at the same time, communicating to one another and us (Weiser, 1991). And to build on this idea, researchers and designers today are thinking of new and exciting ways to bring ubiquitous computers into urban planning, specifically in the process of placemaking. Placemaking is “described as a ‘crucial and deeply valued process for those who feel intimately connected to places in their lives’, one which helps them ‘to reimagine everyday spaces’...” (Griffiths, 2016). These concepts and MIT lab’s project serve as the basis of inspiration for my following proposal.
To begin my project, I knew I wanted to explore the act of placemaking and the potential of ubicomp artifacts or systems to embed itself into urban environments to mitigate our waste problem. Reading Gold’s (close colleague of Weiser at Xerox PARC) Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing, I also wanted to explore the idea of the role that art can play in the ubi-objects of these environments (Gold, 1993). Some of his methods of ideas for ubi-art included customizable “skins” and virtual collaboration.
Many participants from the MIT research project shared that they had not cared to properly throw away their trash before, and that the project had motivated them to learn to do so. This begs the question of why our schools had not taught students proper waste management early on, and if such education could encourage better practices later in life. So in order to narrow my scope as a singular designer with limited resources for user testing, I decided to reimagine the space of public schools and how we educate students on waste management.
In a formal speculative project, I would be conducting research with students and city-goers who interact with public trash cans. For the purpose of this short project timeframe and lack of resources, I will be coming up with designs based on assumptions and conceptual research alone.
To create an educational opportunity around waste management, I decided to propose a reimagining of the humble trash can. Today in schools, we typically see (at best) the well-established 3 categories – a green compost, blue recycling, and black/gray landfill can. These are often effective in helping people separate their trash, but things often end up in the wrong bins anyway due to lack of knowledge or care (packaging is not always designed to be easily disposed correctly either). The question I pose is: how might school trash cans look and act in “the age of ubi-comp”? Based on my prior readings (I will elaborate further into the discussion), I established the goals of this concept:
During my ideation process, I observed the trash cans that currently exist out in the world, especially on UW campuses. Seattle has a variety of trash cans, some solar powered to indicate fullness, others simply a can with an open top. We currently use highly visual indicators on how to dispose of garbage – icons, colors, posters of illustrations/photos. Looking at how myself and others threw away things, I noticed a lack of friction in the current process. Even with the signs, there was no barrier to prevent anyone from throwing a plastic bottle into landfill, or placing a dirty yogurt container into recycling. I also recalled my personal experience of attending school in Taiwan between grades 3-4. There was a different culture there with waste management – children were taught to rinse out used recyclables, toss out bottle caps, pick up litter, etc. But if not integrated into our societal attitude and curriculums, perhaps trash cans could convince us to practice sustainability.