Recycle Stickers
Informational sticker design
Course Advanced Product Design @ Yonsei University (South Korea)
Team Yiwei He, Yunseo Choi
Timeline September - October 2021 (7 weeks)
Online Tools Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Miro, Zoom
Overview
There is an ongoing global trash problem that seems to be extremely relevant. Factors that prevent people from recycling correctly include: lack of information and knowledge, inconvenience, no consequences, and more. Different countries have different government regulations to encourage correct recycling. South Korea mandates households to sort trash by the following categories: paper, glass, can, pet, plastic, and vinyl. COVID has greatly impacted the recycling behavior; there has been an increase in plastic usage and a reduction in recycling rates.
We focused our design problem to: how might we design a trash system that will help improve the street hygiene?
Secondary Research
We learned that people ignore the trash regulations because of: lack of information, assumption that all plastics are recyclable, disregard for contaminated non-recyclable items, and laziness.
We did some field research by walking through the streets of Seoul to see how dirty they were. We noticed that there were a lot of trash bags outside of homes on the street. This was normal because South Korea has implemented a "dispose in front of your house" policy. There are sanitary workers who go to these spots every week to dispose their garbage. This is a government regulation, but we noticed how disorganized it seemed. There were piles of bags that were not separated by trash or recycling. It made the streets look messy and dirty.
Primary Research
Survey Findings
Majority of our participants said that they found the current trash disposal system convenient, but they not necessarily like the system. Many were indifferent towards it, but still had comments about it. Our participants still had complaints about how it could be confusing, smelly, and messy.
We found that disposing in front of the house is a major trash disposing policy in South Korea, but many people don't follow all the recycling policies.
Concept Development
Sketches
Initial Concept
Design 1
Design 2
Prototype Testing
Our first location testing spot in Edae, Seoul showed a slight improvement in the street hygiene, but not enough to make any conclusions.
Our second testing location was in Sinchon, Seoul. People slightly changed their recycling behaviors. Although the general trash still was not in the correct middle spot, they seemed to have separated their recycling towards one side.
2nd Iteration
Problems:
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We found out that lots of people don't know about the government official trash bag for each category (especially for recyclables)
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People were using just any random trash bags and they were not the government ones. The lines that separated the categories were not obvious
Solutions:
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Design a new sticker to indicate correct type of trash bags
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Use additional colored masking tape to indicate the correct zones
2nd Iteration Testing
Location 1
Location 2
An overall small improvement in the street hygiene with the second iteration sticker designs. Though it was a subtle change, it was still better than the first iteration.
QR Code
We added QR stickers to our designs. The sticker said to scan the QR code to learn about each district's disposal system. These numbers were lower than we expected. We thought that more residents would be curious and scan the QR code. But, we suspected that residents might already be familiar with their district's trash disposal system, so wouldn't need to learn about it.
Results and Takeaways
One of the most challenging aspects of this project was the fear of "vandalizing" the streets by putting up our stickers. South Korea is much different from USA and many citizens are very active and making sure that no one breaks the rules. Many bystanders saw us putting up the stickers and asked us about what we were doing. They thought that we were littering and disrupting the normal trash zones. Yiwei and I do not speak Korean well and we had a difficult time explaining our project to them. Some bystanders even asked us to take down the stickers. Other people would even just take rip off the stickers. This disrupted our tests and we had to work with what we could.
Despite the challenges, I really enjoyed this project. I got to be more active in the community. This was important to me because I was going to be studying abroad in Korea for 4 months, and this project made me more aware of what was happening within my own new community. We went out into the local streets of Seoul to find good testing locations. We were able to talk to a few locals to ask them about their thoughts and this helped us with our project. One building manager approved of our project and hoped that our designs would keep his streets clean.
This was a very rewarding project for me. It was my first time working with product design, in something outside of web design. Even though the stickers were much more simple than our classmates, it was probably the most effective, cost efficient, and feasible. Our professor liked how our solution directly helped to address our design problem. We were even rewarded the red S-award at the end of the semester. All of our hard work paid off, and it felt amazing.