Next steps ...

After our Interim Show we are now coming to the end of the research stage of the project and are now entering the concept and modelling stages of the project timeline. The area I am now concentrating on is household recycling and how this is stored and kept with in the home. I am looking at this in terms of my project objective:

“Trying to bridge the gap between design and the community in the respect to recycling, and of how design can help create awareness and change attitudes towards this. Addressing the perceptions people have against recycling and the problems that surface from this, via the use of good design”.

I propose to look at this through creating a product that is inclusively designed to meet the needs and constraints of everyone from wheelchair users and the elderly to the able bodied consumer.

The two main areas I have found that are a problem with consumers are the portability and storage of the containers and also of the recyclable materials. Within my concepts I hope to combine these issues to create a product that will hopefully make the storing and portability of household recycling an easier task to do before it goes out to the kerb side on collection day.

From this I am looking in to modular systems and ways of using un-used areas/spaces of the house mainly the kitchen or the utility room.

4th Year Interm Exhibition

Here are just a few images my interm exhibition. My boards showed an outline of my project to date and also included key images and words that best described what my project was about. We also had three smaller tiles that were arranged on a wall with everyone elses. My film was also shown.

Vancouver 2010

With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics currently on everyones minds and TV screens I thought I would post this quite interesting fact that relates quite nicely to the whole sustainability and recycling issue covered in my project. The medals, designed by architect Omer Arbel, who collaborated with Corrine Hunt, are cast from gold, silver and bronze recovered and reclaimed from discarded computer motherboards.

Husmus recycling bins

Swedish design group Muungano have created a set of containers for collecting household recycling called Husmus (housemouse). The containers are made of offset printed recycled plastics which are held together with plastic rivets, which come flat and need assembled before use.

"Husmus is most likely the worlds best designed and perhaps most charming recycle bin system."

But don´t let their simple shape fool you, behind the form is some hardcore research in to kitchen sizes, different types of standard module’s, garbage throwing behaviour, sizes of plastics and paper bags, the weight of glass, metal, paper and so on. And I think that they are a very modern and well thought out version of the usually unsightly recycling bins or waste recepticals that we get now a days that have more thought about the exterior look and appeal than the inside and of how people will throw the rubbish in to them etc. This will be used as an insight in to my thinking behaviour for next semester ...thinking out of the box!!

PDS take 1

For this week we have been asked to make up a PDS (Product Design Specification) for our project to date. Giving insights that we have found from our research so far and what we propose to do/take from here on forward. So I am sitting just now trying to collate all of this bain of knowledge and information in to an A4 page document.

Get Your Hands Dirty

This is the mini brief that I have been given by Jon, Geoff and Sue to progress my thinking and to challenge my findings and insights further. Fir this I have been told that my research to date had revealed insights into the behaviors and attitudes of recycling. And that it was now time to “get your hands dirty”. So my mini brief was asking me to catalogue ‘waste’:
1. Using the character profiles I have developed, to analyze the ‘waste’ for 3 of the 5 profiles by carrying out a cataloguing activity.
2. Key to this activity will be the categories you create to catalogue by.

I am plodding along with this and will give you more information at a later date.

Project progressions

Things have gone a little slower since the presentations with the big guns! Since then I have progressed my project in regards to looking in to creating character profiles, looking in to their lifestyle and their surroundings to find out insights as to how it may effect the way, or the materials that they recycle. From my research and my own personal insights I have come up with five different character profiles. These are:

• The Urban Warrior
• The Family Cirlce
• The Specific Connoisseur
• The There and Then
• The Fledgling

I think that these five different categories of people describe best the different types of people who recycle.