User Oriented Collaborative Design
Above is our final presentation poster for UOCD. On it, we present “Garbage Gary: Your Yersonal Garbage Guru”, our proposed solution to the many problems that are faced by people in the waste collection and management industry. Gary provides key information to garbage collectors letting them plan their routes to avoid houses that haven’t put out their trash on collection day, and lets recycling plants know if trash has been poorly sorted. Gary interacts with the consumer by providing information on how to best recycle items for their specific municipality, and reminds them to take out the trash. The solutions presented as part of UOCD are never fully realized products, though looks-like and interacts-like prototypes are often built, instead UOCD teaches students to best identify the needs of a specific user groups and to design a set of product functions that best meet those requirements.
In User Oriented Collaborative Design, we are tasked with directly working with a specific user group to design a product that would meet needs that were currently un-met. The general process for how this pans out looks something like this:
Determine user group
Identify potential users to co-design with
Observe users performing their job, identify pain points both explicit and implicit
Build personas based on user priorities
Determine solutions to specific problems identified with each persona
Talk to users again to ensure current state of design is good and they feel like identified problems and proposed solutions are good
Design a specific product concept that would meet user needs while working in an appropriate context
Those are a lot of general points, but the real world application of the process is quite a lot more fluid and can be tailored to the user group you are working with. Our user group for this project was “Waste Disposal Managers”. With that in mind, our first step was to talk to people who we though were representative of the user group, so we scheduled visits to a dump/recycling plant, a thrift store, and a garbage collection company.
Once interviews were conducted, we would make notes of all our observations and interactions during the visits. The intention is to try and begin to determine user needs and map priorities of each user. User needs are determined both through direct questioning of issues, but also by observing day to day interaction and trying to find areas for improvement. From these observations we could construct personas that condensed the priorities and needs of our users into a few general ideas.
With our personas defined, and our user needs evaluated, we began the process of designing a product to meet those needs. This began by envisioning an ideal world for our users, and trying to find a way to get there within the context of the real world.
With a framework established, we began the ideation process and began to narrow down our ideas into a single product.
With the design work done, we settled on the idea of designing an integrated trash can to replace the bins mandated in our area. These trash cans could provide advice to consumers on what to recycle, and when to take out their trash for trash day, while letting garbage collectors know whether trash cans have been put out or not so that they can plan their routes based on which houses have put their trash cans out. The recycling advice also benefits the managers of waste management centers by reducing the amount of cross-contamination and the amount of sorting required of the trash and recycling they take in.
