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Designing for more visible waste prevention

Polar Bear Mother and Cubs on Sea Ice
Photo by Flickr user jidanchaomian

You may recall, a year ago, we celebrated a “polar bear” worth of electronic waste prevented by our participants and volunteers. Now we’re headed towards a ton of electronic waste, which would be more like a whole polar bear family!

To celebrate, and to up our game, we are creating an easy-to-use online tool to track electronic waste prevention, and give users some notion of the impact and dimension of the waste prevented. (We’re currently using a rather simple spreadsheet and some weightings by the Furniture Reuse Network to estimate the weight of electronic waste prevented at our community repair events.)

September 20-21, at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend (coinciding with the London Design Festival), we’ll be designing an easy-to-use system to measure the environmental impact of our community repair events, called Restart Parties.

Over the weekend, we will be

  • generating some user persona and mapping user journeys
  • diving into our existing data set and structuring a future database
  • prototyping widgets and other digital outputs, data visualisations and physical fix-o-meters

The idea is to do this in public, sharing our process and our project with a wide audience – all the while spreading the word about the importance of using electronics longer and preventing unnecessary waste.

Our creations will be relevant to repair groups around the world, inspiring people to repair the world, one device at a time.

So we’re looking for service designers, UX people, data wranglers, coders, dataviz-ers, and physical computing types to join us.

Get in touch if you’d like to join us during the weekend of September 20-21 at the V&A Museum in London.

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