Rodimus
An AI design journey on college students’ trash disposal habits
Overview
Background
AI design project for the class CS 247A: Design for Artificial Intelligence, taught by Julie Stanford.
Our problem area of interest
For this project, we were interested in designing an AI system for our fellow Stanford classmates’ trash sorting habits. We wanted to investigate pertaining to waste management and their underlying environmental impacts from an individualistic perspective.
Who
Helen He
Caleb Robinson
Romuald Thomas
When
April - May 2023
Skills
Design thinking
Human-centered AI design
User research
User experiments
The design journey
Diary study
For our initial research, we invited several Stanford classmates to a diary study. Participants recorded their daily trash sorting habits, including what they threw away and which trash bin they used (e.g. trash, recycling, compost bin...).
Mapping our findings
Theories and insights
Theory: People’s affect their personal sorting habits are affected by how they understand the broader waste disposal system
People have misconceptions of the disposal process and how waste makes its journey from a trash can to a dump site
People are motivated to sort properly because they want to make someone else’s job easier down the line
People are not motivated to sort properly because they believe that most recycling ends up in landfills anyways
Theory: People’s sorting habits are not a reflection of their attitudes towards sustainability, but rather, a reflection of their attitudes towards individual actions making broader change
People have different beliefs about the amount of change they can make as an individual and this affects their sorting habits
Everyone said they wanted to be sustainable and take care of the Earth but not everyone sorted accurately
Theory: Cultural upbringing and broader societal forces tend to influence an individual’s attitude towards waste disposal which can potentially carry on into adulthood
Government sorting processes and regulations differ from country to country
Design trends are unique to specific regions and influence how people sort waste
The types of waste being produced is different in different regions and causes the sorting processes to look different
Brainstorming ideas
From our theories and insights, how might we…
… make trash sorting an activity that’s enjoyable and rewarding?
… help people recognize that even sorting trash as an individual can have a positive environmental impact?
… make trash sorting zero effort?
Brainstorm
Our top ideas
We saw the most potential in the ideas below:
A vending machine that takes trash in exchange for small, basic necessity items
A trash can that is a self-sorting art installation that people can watch
A doomsday clock and adds or subtracts time, depending on if trash is correctly sorted or not
A home assistant that detects when people are approaching trash cans with trash, and instructs people which proper disposal bin to put trash in (e.g. landfill, paper recycling, glass recycling, donate…)
Testing ideas in the wild
To test out how our ideas would perform in the real world, we selected a few of our brainstorm ideas and performed a series of small-scale experiments.
Experiment: Trash Talk
Experiment: Doomsday Clock
Final product
Rodimus: A robot that recycles & repurposes
Final deliverable
What: A design fiction product catalog for Rodimus, a fictional AI 3D printing system designed to recycle and repurpose daily trash.