User error? Or crappy design?
Posted Dec 15, 2022, 7:08 PM UTC · locked
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Both… cups won’t always stack up on top of each other when they fall, as you can see in the far right tube…and there also the fact that people are stupid, that’s widely known and we can’t do much about it lol
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I guess this design was idiot resistant but not idiot proof
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It looks like they made it so the lid has to be turned sideways thus enforcing the user to remove the barrier, deposit the cup, and replace the barrier in order to surpass the designer's "safe guards".
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Crappy design, not saying the users are in the right here. The hard part about recycling design is you have to convince people to care about garbage. Giving them a puzzle to get rid of their crap isn't going to work. Even if it's a baby level puzzle. More and more systems are switching to single stream where the sorting is done at the facility. Even then they have a huge problem with contamination with dangerous or unrecyclable stuff.
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This design fails to take into account that people aren't gonna put in effort to throw away trash they are just gonna dump it and walk away
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User error, obviouly the caps should not be disposed along with the cups or only a few will fit. And one person still put a cup on the caps container.
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Both. Some people even put their cup in where the lids are supposed to go.
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Since there is only one cup in the "lid" section and nothing is on top of it (newer toss), I'd wager that they put it in there since the "cup" side was overflowing.
Still, you're right about it being a bit of both. Designers do need to take into account the shortcomings of the public when designing, though, so it mostly falls on them. Good in theory, flawed in practice.
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That looks like some destination imagination project.
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Both.The tubes for the cups are a bit too narrow for some and also the fact that users randomly chucked their coffee and cups in the wrong tubes
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Crappy design leads to user error. If your design is that easily derailed by user error, you need to head back to the drawing board. If you don’t factor human psychology into design (in this case, the fact that people usually don’t care how they throw things away), you’re not human-centered in your methodology.
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I think it's both. I work in waste reduction and it's notoriously difficult to communicate sortation rules. While you can look at this and understand it, it's poorly designed. The item above each drop spot is way too small. There is no text accompanying the graphic of the items and the graphics are single color and could be missed easily as design images, not directions.
I would have a photo-realistic image above each drop spot with "LIDS, STRAWS, LIQUID, CUPS" written above each. I would also play around with having the background colors behind the tubes be different for each tube to more divide it when glanced at.
Finally, you do have the issue with the cups not fitting together nicely. I think you'd want to consider big changes to that style. But if you do want to stick with this style, you'd maybe want on side to be a bit open so that you could actually guide your cup down.
ETA: waste design also really really needs to include the perspective of the collectors. I would want the facility/maintenance team at this location involved to know if this is actually workable when they go to collect. It's similar to the design needs in restrooms and the need to get that maintenance staff input to see where the use problems will be.
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The metal lids and thick plastic tubes are likely to cause more environmental harm than the cups they collect...
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It is a crappy design. The main image totally overwhelms the tiny icons so they're almost invisible. The one hidden by the cup sticking out is actually not visible at all. The fonts give priority to the wrong thing: "Recycle cups here" tells me much more than "Every cup counts." The tubes and tube lids are all shaped the same way, so they all invite the same functionality / have the same apparent affordance. But honestly, even when I worked at a biotech company staffed by otherwise very smart people, the trash/recycle/compost bins were always completely improperly used. People suck at throwing away their trash for some reason.
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User error.
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Both
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User error omg
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User error, it's all labeled
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Idk cuz not all the cups can fit together so it is kinda crappy, maybe if there was a thing to crush the cups and then collect them it would be more effective
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Bad design for public interaction. Too many steps and no clearly laid out instructions. People in public are going to do exactly what they did. Look at this for less than 3 seconds and put their trash in the first receptacle they see, whether its the right one or not.
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User error. Humans lack the basic reasoning skills to follow pictures... pretty sad really
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Crappy design. People are stupid and lazy. When you design something you need to take that into account.
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User error. It's very clear where to put your lid, straw, liquid, and cup to me.
I think it could be clearer, but it's not rocket science. People are idiots, especially in a rush. They just see the hole and go "Huh, trash bin. Cool?"
It actually seems to be working for the most part. There are a bunch of lids in the lids container but somebody decided to drop their full cup in as well. And the cup container seems to be working mostly as intended but somebody decided not to take their lid off and a few cups fell down sideways.
Definitely crappy design. The cup sizes differ, the smaller ones turn sideways cos the tubes too wide so it doesn’t stack properly
Disagree. While I acknowledge it is very clear where each individual item goes, the design doesn't account for a skewed cup with the bottom rim resting on the top lip in the chute even if everyone followed the rules.
And that's a big if, designs need to be not only idiot proof, but lazy proof as well. There's this story about Walt Disney designing the parks with trash cans every so many paces, basically he wanted to make it more difficult to litter than to simply toss your trash. Whether or not that was actually his idea, I'm not sure.
When I was in the navy, one of the best lessons I learned about people and order and rule following was from cleaning the heads. You share a head with 30+ dudes and you'd think they'd all have a personal interest in keeping the head in good, clean, working order. But that's not the case. It's the broken window theory, which I always called the Kipple problem (Im a fan of Phillip K. Dick). Basically Kipple is inevitable, everything turns to Kipple, and Kipple will always multiply, and it takes energy and work to keep things from becoming Kipple. If the head starts clean and fully stocked each morning, there will be less clean up the next morning. If it starts dirty, or is disarray, without tp in the stalls, it's all going to be chaos.
Basically this design relies on each and every person to a) only have disposable beverage cups to dispense of, b) be willing to disassemble their beverage cups, c) have the time to disassemble the beverage cups for disposal, d) have enough free hands to disassemble a beverage cup.
As soon as one person is uncompliant, the entire thing becomes a mockery.
This is bad design.