Recycling

The Challenge:The Triangle Usability Professionals’ Association hosted a design competition to redesign recycling in Durham, NC as part of an event for World Usability Day 2009. Durham recently moved to using roll-out carts for residential curbside recycling, but HumanCentric saw an opportunity to improve the in-home recycling experience and how users collect and store recycling prior to placement in the carts provided by the city.

The Approach:

• 130-person online survey of recycling habits and pain points.
• Collected stories and photos of in-home recycling habits for a dozen HumanCentric employees.
• Interviewed owner of a recycling pick-up service in Cary.
• Collected examples of flyers, including materials distributed by the City of Durham.
• Reviewed common recycling bins and recycling trash cans for consumer use.
• Ideation & design ideas.
• Prototype.

The Result:Through our user research, we determined that people do not know what they can recycle, and believe a lot of mis-information since recycling guidelines vary from one municipality to another. People also have difficulty with in-home recycling because they do not have a good place to store recyclables before placing in the cart for curbside pickup, and in-home bins can get very heavy and difficult to carry for some users. Finally, current recycling bins have an industrial feel to them and many users do not want them visible in their homes, but bins in a garage or outside are less convenient and less likely to be used. We designed the recycling bin to fit under a standard kitchen counter, but it is also styled as a consumer product that can be placed in a visible location within the home. It ships flat to be assembled by the end-user through simple steps of folding and snapping. This reduces costs to the City of Durham for distributing the bins to residents, or makes it easier to sell the bins in a store. We used a triangle shape to provide a pouring spout when dumping the contents into the cart. We created a simple and elegant information graphic that could be hung on a refrigerator, affixed to the side of a recycling bin, or printed on a sticker provided by the City of Durham to place on the recycling cart. It provides suggestions of what to do with a variety materials (recycle at home, take to a recycling drop-off center, take to a hazardous waste drop-off center, compost, or dispose with other home trash), educating the consumer about more than just in-home recycling. Finally, it provides an easy-to-remember URL to find out more information about recycling in Durham.

Services: Human factors, User research, Graphic design, Product design, Product illustration, 3D form studies, Concept development, Design engineering