TrashScan
TrashScan is an app that is aimed to help people to sort out the waste correctly. The majority of the waste placed in the mix waste container shouldn´t be there as it is recyclable. Due to lack of knowledge, confusion or lack of time people tend to put their trash in the mix waste container.
TrashScan can recognise the material of each product with AI and it tells you which is the correct container to place it. People only need their phone and taking a picture of the trash they don´t know where to place and TrashScan will tell the answer. Moreover, it also shows the nearest location where you can find the correct container.
My role
- Service Design
- Strategic Design
- Design Thinking
- Creative direction
- Sustainability
Achievements
This project was done for Junction SDG hackathon 2023. It was selected in the Top 5 out of 90 projects.
The challenge was the SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. As consumers that we are, we looked for the problems we have in the everyday life related to responsible consumption.
Empathizing with consumers, brainstorming, researching solutions, ideating and creating personal journey maps helped to figure out what was the problem to solve ; Confusion when recycling. Once we knew the problem, the solution came easily, an app that tells us where to place the trash to recycle it correctly.
TrashScan was designed to help you sort out the waste correctly without extra efforts. For that reason, the interface is very easy to use. Once you open the app you will instantly access the scanning page. Clicking in “Scan” your phone’s camera will be opened so you can scan your trash. If you want to learn more about the separating system in your region you can also scroll down in the home page. There you can see the different types of trash that are collected in each bin. This section is a secondary function that can be displayed only if the user is interested on it. The main function is: knowing what to do with your trash at the moment. For that reason the home page is clean and takes the user directly to start scanning.
Once TrashScan recognises the object it shows the next page with information about the material and where to place it. If there is more than one option, for example, recycling it and return it for money, it will show you all of them. The main objective of this page is that the user knows where it should be placed. That information is shown as main titles so everyone could understand. There is also a button that shows the nearest location in case the user doesn’t know where the container is..
The last page of the app shows a map with the location where the user can find the nearest trash bin to place the waste scaned.
With this
feature, the purpose is making recycling easy and comfortable for the user.
This can be very useful when a person is in a new place, on holidays or in the
street as they may not know where the trash containers are.
During the project my role as a service designer was having a wide vision of the process and keep everyone in the same page. I coordinated the strategy to be able to present the idea properly within the limited time available . I focused on the art direction of the storyboard done for a VIDEO. Knowing the storyboard and the different steps of the journey the team ideated the pages needed in the app. Based on that, two Ux designers designed the different pages to be able to have the prototype.
Outcomes
- Once you know the real problem, the solution will come easily. For this project more than 50% of the time was used to find a real problem in sustainability.
- When everyone in the team has the same interest and is focused to work for a common goal it is easier to find out the way to go.
- Nobody can do everything on their own. It is important to know your strengths and weaknesses to know where to help and where to delegate.
- Working in a sustainability project always encourages me to keep on creating more projects.
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