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Monster Bins

Info

The purpose of this project was to teach children the habit of throwing rubbish in garbage bins. The project expanded over a few weeks and the end result was an app that encouraged children to develop a habit of throwing garbage in bins by collecting monsters and hopefully leading to a lifelong habit.

Project:

An educational app for children

 

Role:

UX/Game Designer

Monster-bins-start-page

Discover

After getting our brief and deciding on working with trash in parks, we did further observations and noticed that young children generally don’t throw trash in the bin. We decided to focus more on this and do more research on why this was the case. We also thought it would be a fun age group to work with.

We wanted to find out more about what is being done currently to prevent kids from throwing garbage on the ground, to make them more aware of the environment and what effect this has. During our desk research, we found an organization called Keep Sweden Clean that organizes trash picking days and has created a number of games, all in order to educate kids on the effect that trash has on the environment. We decided that we wanted to incorporate these ideas into everyday life and make them fun for kids to use. To implement the habit of throwing trash in the bin in a more interactive and fun way.

Once we knew more about our chosen topic, we used other design methods such as interviews and participant observations. We did interviews with people at parks, parents to kids in our chosen age group, and teachers to find out more about habits and what kids are taught both home and at schools. We did participant observations in order to see if there are enough bins around, if they are hard to find, too far apart, or well located in parks.


 

 

Define

After our fieldwork, we collected the data to analyze it. We started to pick apart our findings, interviews, and research we had done, looking for patterns or similarities.

We tried to stay aware, that children might not always be objective in an interview, there could be a risk of them interpreted their own feelings in their answers to make themselves look better. In every statement, we always looked for another source stating something similar i.e. a parent, teacher, or our own observations. We could easily see a pattern that became one of our main insights; A lot of schools teach their students about the importance of using bins, very often at a young age, this was told to us by both children, teachers, and parents, but still, the habit is not always implemented in everyday life. Again, this was confirmed to us both by children and parents that we interviewed but also seen in our own observations. Through our data we came to the conclusion this could be as a result of a number of things:

- Throwing trash is boring

- Trash sometimes gets thrown on the ground in anger

- Trash sometimes gets thrown on the ground to look cool in front of friends

From our insights, we decided we wanted to create something fun for children to teach them the habit of using bins. Most kids already get the lecture from school and the dos and don’ts but we wanted to come at this from a different angle, was there a fun way to implement a habit?
So from these insights, we started our ideation with the opportunity statement: How might we teach children the habit of throwing rubbish in bins in a fun way?

We also decided to only work with parks. We realized as our users are children there was a safety issue with kids getting too involved with our design and not think about their surroundings such as roads and traffic.


 

 

Develop

After initial research and brainstorming, we used several ideation methods for developing our ideas. We used concept portraits and the X-3-5 method (Gkouskos, 2017). The concept portraits didn’t provide us with any direct ideas but instead helped to show us emotions and experiences, that we wanted our design to reflect onto the people using it.

The X-3-5 method helped us really moving forward when we were stuck on an idea. Even when we had ideas this method helped us in developing these in creative and innovative ways.

Lastly, we used time flow diagrams (Gkouskos, 2017) to help us organize all our different ideation methods since we found that this was a good way to visualize our development and understand the big picture.

Throughout the ideation, we discussed how we could make throwing rubbish fun. We discussed many different ideas that changed the physical appearance of the garbage bins as well as adding things like QR codes to add more interactivity. We realized that we wanted to stay away from altering the physical aspects of the rubbish bins so that everyone can still use them without having to do anything extra to engage with the garbage bins if they don’t want to. We wanted the design to be able to be used by everyone, but it should not be mandatory. The ideation moved us in the direction of making an app because it addressed these issues.

 
 

sketch

Deliver

After ideation, we settled on an app idea that involves motion and shape recognition features. The app is a game where you collect and upgrade the monsters, that you collect from different garbage bins. You simply walk up to a garbage bin and with the app scan the garbage bin and the trash you want to throw away. You throw the trash in and a monster will appear. If you keep putting trash in, the monster will continue growing.

The first prototype we developed was made of cardboard and paper to closely resemble the feel of a real phone and using it to point and scan. There were several pages that you flipped through to show you the different stages of the process when using the app. In our user- testing this turned out to be explained and showed with too much technical detail. There were too many steps and it was not clear when you had to flip the page. Understanding what actually happened and how the app functioned made sense. Part of the problem was that it was a flip mechanic and not touch or tap. We also understood by doing a physical prototype that it was important to make the physical interaction on the screen as minimal as possible since you're holding rubbish in your other hand. When developing our second prototype we considered this information and decided to design the prototype using software called Marvel to build our prototype app in. Marvel (2017) is a software where you can get a visual representation of the app and it gives you touch and transition options to illustrate what the final product could do and what it would look like. Marvel made it possible to get a more accurate representation of the app, but the physical prototype was still essential to understanding which areas of the prototype needed the most work.

 

What went well

- Good group dynamic. We were able to hear each other out and express our thoughts and ideas really well within the group. We feel like everyone made their voices heard throughout the process and we listened to every idea, thought, and considered them before making a decision that would impact the group. Also, a very important aspect of our good group dynamic is that everyone did an equal amount of work so there were no disputes of skewed workload.

- Narrowing the area down and focusing our research on relevant areas. We had a quite big focus area to work with. We were given parks and squares to focus on and we were pretty quick to pick a specific problem area and a specific user group.

- Ideation went really well, we used a lot of methods in our ideation, but the concept portraits and x-3-5 were most important. The concept portrait was great for showing us what emotions and experiences we wanted to convey through our design. And x-3-5 was great for helping us to come up with the idea itself, what it was that we were going to create.

What could have gone better

- Criticizing more, not just negative critique but just more critique overall. It felt like we were all agreeing too much, this was in part due to our great group dynamic, but we should be more open with our criticizing. Good ideas can come from criticizing and point out weak points in an idea. It is also important to know potential flaws with a design. As long as you don't get too negative or too nitpicky critiquing shouldn't be an issue and this might be an area where we could improve.

- Could do even more in the ideation stage, use more methods and try more new things. We used different methods in our ideation stage, but it felt like we could do more, or try some new ideation methods. Although we felt like our ideation stage wasn't a problem, we still felt like this was an area where we could improve greatly.

- Could analyze our fieldwork more and more efficiently. We gathered heaps of data with our research and our analysis of this data was not the most efficient. We had such a big area to focus on at first it meant doing a lot of research that was never used in the end. At the time when we decided on an area and target group, we gathered some more data but it became too much for us to analyze in the time span that we had so we had to prioritize and focus our analysis on the most important parts. Moving forward we decided that it would be best to set aside more time for research analysis since we learned that this was a very important step that we didn't put the necessary amount of time into.

Team:

Anna Wahl

Jonas Drewling

Benjamin Dannegård

Line Göst

 

Year:

2019

 

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If you would like to get in touch, here's my email: Alexandergrovnes@gmail.com or use the links below