Design Project 1

SCENE 1

nothing about sustainability here

• observed people coming and going into the community room in my dorm for about 30minutes and saw a lot of them struggling with the card key: they were holding cooking ware, or plates, or food, and their hands weren’t available to search for the key in their pockets.
• This caused several funny/not-so-funny scenes like people putting down their stuff on the floor to be able to open the door and stuff like that.
• So I thought about my: if I have my car key inside the pocket, I just need to press the opening handle. What if we add this function to the dorm keys? So the students would only need to press handle of the door if the card key is close enough
• Also, the key card could be printed with a QR code linking to useful stuff for anybody who’s new into the Campus especially related to sustainable behaviour: energy saving tips, for example.

SCENE 2

cool but maybe the tech specs involved would be too expensive? also nothing about sustainability

• I observed my room and my apartment, noticing in just a few square meters there are two doors with two automatic locks
• I watched my house mate writing down post-its on both his room door and the entrance door with “REMEMBER ID!!!” written in caps lock so he remember to bring his key everytime he exit from his room. We discussed about how easy is to forget it in a rush (maybe you’re late for lesson or you’re worried about something).
• Maybe (like some hotels) the rooms could be equipped with a little holder where you put your card, and if the card is still on the holder when you exit and close the door, it won’t lock.

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTESIS

People buying on Amazon lot of stuff for the dorms

Maybe there’s a way to make it more sustainable / fun ?

volunteering distributing extra stuff you don’t take home?

SCENE 3

• This morning I spent some time observing how my apartment kitchen is designed. I was having breakfast with my house mate and I observed him collecting the trash from our apartment to bring them to the waste disposal room we have in our floor. He was struggling, bent under the washbasin, because a plastic package didn’t fit the tiny bins. Also, after he pulled one bag up it was hard to close, even with very few garbage in it and he was very bothered because he doesn’t like to have plastic bags all around with the bigger garbage that doesn’t fit. At the same time, I finished my orange juice (I bought a big can from Trader Joe) and noticed that it was bigger than the bin itself. I noticed that - even if inside the Recycling /Landfill room you can find all the propers collectors and informations, it’s very hard to do that inside the apartment because the form of the trash bins is so bad. They’re very tiny and there are no instructions on how to use them to properly divide stuff.
• DOMAIN: garbage disposal / recycling
• So I thought that the apartment trash bins could be re-designed:
• labels in each bin to help students to put everything in separated bins with the same logic of the collectors in the recycling room
• bigger bins (a simple Pringles package is hard to fit in!)
• a QR code at the entrance with instructions on how to recycle properly (as a foreigner students I know that rules can change from country to country)
• Going further, in order to commit people to recycle more, landfill bins could be locked and you could open them with your ID but with a fixed amount of usage per month, and after that you have to pay (just a rough / maybe crazy idea to be refined)
• SIZE OF THE PROBLEM: I spoke with my house mate and a few other students and all confirmed that they basically don’t recycle in their apartment because it’s too complicated: also some of them are not so into the US regulations about garbage disposal so even if they would recycle, they make mistakes. So basically this makes the whole purpose of having big recycling bins in our floor pointless. I think it could be a good fit to improve this not only for the actual impact on the amount of recycling but also for building a consistent message of commitment towards sustainability all around the campus.
• GAMIFICATION / EDUCATION : noted - I need to interview my housemate and dig deeper into the level of education that could be provided