GroupProposal: Urple
From IEOR 170 Spring 2007
Contents |
[edit] Project Proposal and Brainstorm
Group: Urple
Members: Tawan Udtamadilok, Katherine Tong, Patrick Liu, & Jason Hu
[edit] Brainstorming
Get people to drink more water
1. Water fountain that encourages drinking: fun colors, pictures, water logo, fashionable,
2. Sculptural beauty; fountain; movement attracts people.
3. Remind people how much water they should drink
4. Fish tank integrated - fish tell when the water’s good
Make exercise into a game (with physiological monitoring?)
1. Arm/leg sensors monitoring pulse, movement, exertion… like Wii sports & X-box Pilates.
2. Encouraging voice automation. With countdown to your physical fitness goal.
3. Devices you wear all the time; monitor all movement all day for personalized fitness advice/planning
4. Stomach implant measures caloric intake.
5. PDA calculates consumption – scans food; indicates nutritional value, energetic efficiency, etc…
6. All purpose personal physiological tracker… constant reminders of personal health statistics through clear info-graphics - calories consumed vs. burned today, this week, this year; versus what you intended…
Public-use exercise equipment
1. Exercise bikes, rowing machines, ellipticals, etc, located in Bart stations, town squares, etc…
2. Enable people to recharge personal electronics (cell phones, ipods…)
3. Exercise in exchange for public transportation credit based on power generated & traded to the City
4. Public art installations powered by bike – video projections chosen/manipulated by rider, musical/sonic art as well; the more people that join the biking horde, the more complex/beautiful the art generated
5. An enduring marathon – get a corporate sponsor to donate $ to a charity (of your choice?) based on how far you bike – just like those charity marathons.
Lock junk food in safe, opened by exercise; you have to work for your food Making exercise more social with workout buddy finder
Encourage recycling & composting
1. Public fountain available for rinsing
2. Public composting bins; a “composting” logo
3. Flowers or other pretty plants growing on bins
4. Complete algae/plankton ecosystem is fed by compost.
5. Local garden fertilized with compost; if crop is good enough, cafeteria/café will serve the fresh produce
Reduce wastefulness of flyering
1. Public LCD screens, projections
Reduce electricity consumption
1. Pretty lights around town are only turned on if the populous meets energy savings goals.
Public Transportation
1. Having a system where the exact location of the bus location: reducing wait time uncertainty
2. Having a change dispenser when paying for the bus.
3. Possibly satellite monitoring the buses?
4. Develop a new service; more efficient than buses but cost slightly more.
5. Have a map on the Bart that shows the exact location and when it stops at each stop it will announce the stop; essentially the guy running the Bart won’t have to announce it.
6. Create a website where people can request rides to exact locations and if enough people sign up they’ll go to the most requested location.
[edit] Selection
For the most part, we seemed attracted to the challenge of encouraging people to reduce their waste. That is, ensuring that the maximum possible amount of trash is recycled or composted and not directed to the landfill.
Even though the problem of encouraging recycling is one that a lot of people have tried to tackle and continues to be struggle for most people (ourselves included), it is an important one. In an economy where tremendous forces are rallied to convince us to consume ever more, people need to look out for ways to reduce the side effects of that consumption.
As one of the most politically and ecologically progressive places in the country, the City and UC campus of Berkeley is an ideal place to engage the community in an effort to make our consumption/waste habits slightly more sustainable.
[edit] Project
Target User Group:
Everyone. Our target user group is everyone in the public who needs to dispose of trash while in public places.
Problem:
Our city and campus community generates large amounts of trash every day. Much of this trash could be recycled or composted, but most of it is not. We need to reduce effort it takes to recycle and compost. We need to make the process simple, attractive, and convenient. People like to see an immediate benefit for their efforts. What would make people really feel like it was something that benefits them individually?
Context:
On campus, in public bins are available, but people still don’t recycle everything they can out of laziness, or they forget, or they don’t care about the environment, or they can’t rinse off their soiled plastics. Off campus, the problem is even worse. There are very few recycling bins publicly available, and people care even less. Private businesses are major contributors to the waste as well. Just looking at the Asian Ghetto food court after a busy night, you can see half-finished takeout boxes stacked on top of the overflowing trash bins. Almost all of that is recyclable or compostable.
Encouraging composting is even more challenging because there are no public composting bins on or off campus. Also, the vast majority of the community does not compost and is not aware of what can and cannot be composted, nor of the ecological benefits of composting. So this requires a two-pronged strategy of informing the public as well as making the process simple, convenient, and accessible to them.
Belief & Theme:
This project definitely the criterion of “persuasive deign for the community.” It is a public waste disposal system designed to encourage the responsible and sustainable disposal of public wastes, in a way that is beneficial to our environment and hopefully makes life better for the public at large.
Potential Solutions:
We would like to integrate several of our ideas into a comprehensive public waste disposal station. We are not yet exactly sure which of our ideas we’d want to integrate, but they are among the ideas listed below.
1. Attractive aesthetics… color, design, fashion, sculptural
2. Fountains so people can wash their plastic takeout boxes for recycling.
3. Drinking fountain such that waste water is used for plants/garden or something else useful.
4. We have to make composting available to the public next to the recycling/trash bins.
5. Info-graphics make it clear what goes where. Describes the intended use.
6. Integrating the composting system with a garden or flowers or other natural system that demonstrates the benefits of composting. They’re fertilized by the compost; beautifies the campus; the more people compost, the more beautiful the flowers get.
7. Automated water bottling… buy a bottle of water that is just filtered tap water, made by a vending-type machine on the spot. Then turn in a bottle to get the bottle of cheap water. Or get for water from recycling. The whole process of bottling water and shipping it to stores is really energetically inefficient when tap water is so cheap and good. Just running this as an on-campus business is a good idea.
