Sort-o-matic 9000: Convenient Waste Disposal Systems in Restaurants
By James Liu, Kashish Aggarwal, Faith Mathison, Muskan Bawa
Problem and Solution Overview
Many customers in the US eat at restaurants because it is convenient, but having to sort waste into appropriate bins can be confusing and/or annoying, which can be an inconvenience for environmentally conscious restaurant customers. Customers may find themselves unable to sort their waste correctly, or even decide against doing so entirely in the interest of time, opting to instead dump everything into the garbage. To address this, our design incorporates a tablet depicting the kind of waste which should go into the appropriate bin to make sorting easier, an alert system to provide quick feedback to users on the correctness of their sorting, and a robot that moves the waste to the correct bin if it wasn’t put in the right one. This design requires little effort to use, teaches users about correct sorting behavior, and ensures that waste is put into the right bin.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
The main subjects of our research were people who go out to eat at restaurants. We used two main methods for our user research: a fly-on-the-wall observation and a brief survey. We did two sessions of fly-on-the-wall observations at two different restaurants, one at lunch and one at dinner, in the hopes of gathering diverse data without influencing subjects’ behaviors. Also, we obtained data from people we don’t know and from a diverse group of people coming to that restaurant, giving us a less biased representation than just talking to our friends, family, and classmates. We successfully gathered a large amount of data on where customers put items and how long they took to make sorting decisions.
For our survey, we created an easily shareable online form with few required short answer questions to encourage respondents that it won’t take much time. We used what we learned from the observational studies to form our questions, probing on customer preferences when sorting waste and what difficulties they encounter. We included space for respondents to share more if they felt inclined as well. We shared our survey with family, friends, and classmates and let them share it to their friends to get a variety of responses. Our survey was able to give us insight on people’s feelings, frustrations, and assumptions about what waste sorting should be like which aided our design.
Design Research Results and Themes
Throughout our design process, we found out most individuals are not opposed to the idea of waste sorting and some are willing to try to sort, even if how they sort is inaccurate. It seems like as designers and architectures, we don’t necessarily need to make sorting more appealing, but easier for people to do. Additionally, based on our findings, we noticed that most individuals are actually lazy and wouldn’t want to read labels or try to extrapolate from existing signage if their specific use case of waste isn’t covered. They also don’t like to make decisions nor separate objects into individual categories or components. Interestingly, we also found a few people who peeked into the bins to identify the waste already in that bin or the category of the bin.
Consequently, this means that we don’t need to focus on making waste sorting appealing to begin with; we just need to make it easy enough that people won’t decide it is too much effort. We noticed that many people threw away whole items such as cups with lids on them. The problem here is that some of these items may contain materials that belong in separate waste categories (for example, a compostable cup with a recyclable lid). This suggests that it would be ideal if our design allowed people not to have to separate things (though this seems like a technological longshot). People tend to not like making decisions in the waste sorting process. In particular, at BB’s Teriyaki, a restaurant where everything is compostable, 12 of the 18 people we observed throwing things away, went to the area with only one compost bin rather than the one with three. This suggests that we should design in such a way that shifts decision-making responsibility away from the user. The overwhelming majority of people we observed spent no more than 1 second at the waste bins before throwing things away and leaving. So, users need to be able to interact with our design very quickly (or not at all); we should avoid forcing users to read too much or look at external sources of information. When presented with examples of items similar to what they wanted to throw away, users sometimes assumed the items went in the same bin when they did not (recyclable boxes looking similar to compostable boxes). Our design needs to be comprehensive to avoid the possibility of users making faulty assumptions like this. People tend to follow what others are doing (looking to see what’s already in the bins, following examples of people who just threw things away). This is something that we might be able to leverage in our design.
Proposed Design
Our proposed solution is a special kind of waste disposal area that has several functions to assist customers. The waste disposal area consists of three bins: trash, recycling, and compost. Above each of the three bins mounted at eye-level is a tablet which will display images of items from the restaurant that go in that bin. On top of the entire setup there is a speaker and a beacon that turns red when waste is put in the wrong bin and green if properly sorted. The speaker plays a quiet ding when sorting correctly or makes a fail noise on improper sorting. There is a scanner at the rim of each bin to detect whether an item is sorted correctly or not. Finally, there is a robot with a long arm that stays next to the bins. In the case that something is put in the wrong bin, it will navigate to that bin, fish it out, and move it to the proper bin.
