Month: April 2019

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Deliverable #2: Recycle Tycoon game

So for my second idea, I wanted to create an educational game and my first initial idea was a drag and drop game where you put the right recyclables into the right bin as they fall down your screen.

But after consulting with Michael, I realsied that the tone of my game should have been something light instead of being scary. And plus I did not integrate the text properly with the graphic at the background so it didn’t look that great either.

After going back to think about the game, I decided to play a number of educational recycling games on the app store to give me inspirations.

However after playing them, I realise that the replayability of these educational games were not that high, as they tend to be aimed more towards education rather than the gameplay. So instead of educational games, I tried to think of games that I had played a lot by myself. And through my old downloads history, I found Tiny Towers and thought that it would be a perfect example to base my game on.

Image result for tiny towers

Here is a list of things I came up with when trying to come up with the stack up your building and business game.

And onto the actual game:

First the icon, I had a lot of difficulty trying to come up with an icon as I wasn’t thinking about how my icon should represent both aspects of recycle and tycoon. So for my final version, I decided to create a stack of green coins with buildings at the background to indicate that throughout the gameplay we will be running a green business that is still able to be as successful as the other businesses.

As for my game pages:

My home page:

For my home page, I decided to have my game title hanging from a sign board. I intended the yellow shape to be that of an upward graph to reflect that through the gameplay, you would be succeeding as you advance.

And in the store, you can buy new floors with new businesses, hire new employees as well as level up your stocks to be more environmentally friendly. All these will help you with building your reputation as a green mall, which in turns have financial benefits such as getting sponsors.

Game play will cycle through fast forwarded day and night, the amount of money and reputation you earned consolidated at the end of each day.

So by collecting money and building up reputation, you will get eventually earn money in order to invest in a new recycle business.

Special events that are actually based on real life events would be implemented into the game so that players can learn to be more aware of those real dates.

Loading screen that will always display recycle information.

All in all, I wanted to create a game that is fun to play for everyone in the family and not just the kids, and through this management game, players can experience gameplay with education at the same time. When players are informed that these business are based on real businesses, it would encourage them to be more aware of recycle businesses in their real life, hopefully prompting them to support them outside of the game too!

With that I wrap up my deliverables and this recycle project that has been with me for one whole semester!

 

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Deliverable #1

So before I moved on to my deliverables based on my survey, I decided that I would try to brain storm for a number of solutions that those who took the survey have suggested would be effective which were:

  • Better labels
  • Better instructions
  • Incentives

And with that in mind I tried to come up with a few ideas

  • New labels for the recycle bins
  • A program that lets you trade your recyclables for a recycled product
    • for example for every bulk of paper you recycle, you get back a recycled notebook
  • An app that helps you track your recycling with
    • with an interactive plant/character that grows on your recycling efforts
  • Calendar in an app
  • Educational game
  • Magnets

My first idea was to create a calendar in an app in order to help remind the people to recycle regularly. However, as Michael pointed out, it wouldn’t work out that well if it was in Singapore context as we do not have a schedule to follow in order to recycle. He also pointed out that I should be looking for ways to urge the family to recycle at their homes first before I move on to changing the state and labels of the recycling bins. He suggested perhaps I create stickers that would be useful in helping these families categorize at home.

From there I decided to look at pinterest to look at ways I can make a sticker that will hold a lot of information, such as types of plastics, etc…

Gorgeous colors with sleek packaging

However, after trying to design, I feel that putting labels on the stickers was not a good idea from me as different recyclables had different specs; while there are a lot of categories for plastics, almost all metals can be recycled. As such the stickers would not be able to look uniform.

So instead making these label stickers as my main deliverable, I decided to keep the stickers simple and instead make them part of an instructional booklet, that instead would teach the readers what the categories are and such.

So for the booklet here is my initial brainstorm for what could be inside the booklet

  • Why the need for families to start recycling
  • Classification of plastic types
  • What types of paper cannot be recycled
  • Contamination of recyclables
  • How to prevent that by Emptying, rinsing and drying your recyclables
  • Places to look out for donation
  • Articles that have to do with recycling
    • for e.g: Tampines eco-digester

However in the end, I decided to leave articles out, as if I intend this to be mailed to the family households monthly with new articles, then the instruction part of the booklet would be redundant after a few issues as it will just get repetitive for no reason. Therefore since my priority is getting the instructions out, I decided to instead make it an issue that gets reprinted only when necessary changes are to be made.

So first off when designing the cover, I was thinking of how I can convey these ideas in one image:

  • A guide to recycle right
  • Recycling or green living
  • Following the right steps when it comes to recycling
  • Family
  • Habit

So after going through my old pictures, I thought that a project that I have previously mentioned in my first few weeks had the imagery that might work in my favour.

I thought that this imagery was a good way to depict the triangular recycle cycle, at the same time shows a cyclic nature of encouraging recycling as a continuous habit. And I thought that if I replace the platfroms with the numbers 1,2,3 it would reinforce the idea of following the steps in order correctly in order to recycle right. I thought that adding the grids at the background would also suggest that its a literal guide book while providing background structure for the skeleton of the isometric graphic that I intend to make.

After coming up with the structure, I added the family members doing their parts in recycling different items that can be recycled.

And as for the page inside:

At first I was planning to take a more graphical approach but decided against it as it does not match the cover spread and also I found it hard to fit my text in my graphic centric spread that I drafted.

So in the end I just decided to create a much more simple and clean graphics so that the texts can be easily read. To do that I tried to limit the colours that I use to green and orange for text so that it can have a cohesive look.

And for the rest of the spreads, I decided to collect the information from websites and compile them accordingly to each section.

As for the middle page, I decided to insert a sheet of stickers that can help the families to categorise their containers at home.

I had a really hard time trying to organise all the information that I have collated from the websites to make them look cohesive as a whole but overall I’m really glad that I managed to make them look like they are part of the same aesthetic! And also learnt a few things about kiss cut stickers and  also about the whole recycling process in general so I’m glad I took up this project! :,D

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Infographic

SURVEY

For my survey, I created the questions with the intention to find out the relationship between the current households in Singapore and recycling; mainly on

  • How often do they recycle
  • What items do they recycle
  • What discourages them from recycling
  • What design solutions would they be the most effective for them to recycle more.

Here’s the Survey link:

https://forms.gle/ij6KvQAyhm4cmHPY6

Basic information about the participants and recycling

 

As of today, I had 19 responses in total, all of whom have recycled before. Paper and plastic seems to be the most common item that the participants tended to recycle, with food and cartridge boxes being the least common.

Recycle bins near households seems to be the most popular choice for recycling, with recycle bins outside of their homes taking up almost the rest of the pie chart.

As for how often the participants recycled, there is a wider variation of responses, with most recycling at least once a week and at least once every 3 months.

However, most of my participants ended up being in their twenties, as I ended up only sending out to my friends. Since I wanted to know more about the other members of the household, I decided to add in another question after the first round of survey, to ask them to tell me more about how their household recycle.

 

Based on new responses, it seems that most of the other members of the household especially the parents, either do not recycle or recycle on rare occasions.

In conclusion, based on my research, it seems that it seems that there is a lack of a initiative in the families to recycle together as a habit, with only one or some members of the family recycling from time to time. So I think in order to increase the domestic recycling rates, we should push all members of the families to recycle together in each household so that recycling becomes accepted as a habit instead of a chore.

Issues with Recycling

 

For the next section, I tried to get information on the reason or reasons why families are not willing to recycle as much as it is desired. For the most part, it seems that the general lack of information on how to sort and the extra steps required to separate and prepare the items tend to be why many family members tend to stray away from doing so regularly.

dESIGN SOLUTION

Here I asked people for suggestions on what they think would be a good solution for pushing people to recycle more, and the two most popular suggestions tended to be better instructions or labels and incentive driven initiatives.

And here I gave a range of suggestions on ways to encourage people to start recycling and what they thought would be effective on them. And better instructions for both identifying the recyclables and as well as the process, plus incentive driven programs were the popular ones.

Conclusion:

Before the survey, I was intending to focus on the adults in the households in order to encourage domestic recycling but through this survey, I decided to focus on the whole recycling together as a family to promote recycling as a family habit rather than just the adults. This survey also helped me narrow down how my deliverables can effectively target them; 1 to better instructions or labels and 2 to motivate recycling culture through incentives.

Aim of the infographic:

 

So after my survey, I decided to target  households and urge them to start recycling together as a family. In my infographic explanation exempt, I decided to write about the negative consequences of not recycling, in particular Pulau Semakau running out of space, in order to encourage them to start recycling.

Here’s the final paragraph that I came up with

“Despite many efforts and initiatives done by the governement to recycle better over the last decade, Singaporean families are still not recycling enough.

However, we no longer take things for granted like this as our only landfill, Pulau Semakau is running out of space faster than anticipated when we are sending over tons of recyclables along with the trash.

This infographic hopes to urge Singaporean families to start the habit of recycling together as a family to save our landfill as well as the earth, supported by the data from a Personal survey, Straits Times, and NEA”

As for the title at first I came up with

“Make it a habit, instead of a chore”

But I decided to go with

“Let’s start recycling as one big family” (before its too late)

So that it goes better with my target audience being families.

And for my title, and some of the numbers in my statistics I decided to go with this chalky font so that it will link to education and it was kid friendly as well.

 

Graphics of the infographic:

 

Since I wanted to create a sense of urgency for households to start recycling, I decided that a graphic that depicts the severity of our landfill running out of space and the impact that it would have on each family. Therefore, I decided to compose my graphics with a family trying to stay afloat on an expiring Semakau with all the infographic surrounding them to make it look like they are being cornered by the “statistical behaviors”  of our current households.

Then i divided the earth into different colours of waves so that it can help me divide the information into levels later on. I then started filling them up with floating trashes in the water.

Content of the infographic:

 

So first I tried to find information and numbers that would easily catch people’s eyes when they are glancing at the poster so I decided to research more instead of just depending on my survey to get bigger and more accurate numbers in order to urge people to start recycling as a family together.

And as for the infographic graphics I wanted to incorporate the recyclables from the  bin; paper, plastic, and metal.

So the first information I had was a set of information I have gathered from my survey on how often does families recycle?

I decided to shorten this information in order to make it more impactful, collating the results from at least once every 3 months to at least once a year into a total percentage so that  it seems more detrimental. So in the end, I translated this information to the fact that only 65% of the families recycle at least once every 3 months.

Since this was about how often households recycle, I decided to use a graphic of a calendar.

The second set of information is another survey result I got, when asking them who in their families recycle.

(Since this was a question I added later on, I only had the later answers listed :.))

I decided to collate them into numbers by categorising into 3 categories: No one in the family recycles, At least one other member recycles and Everyone in the family recycles.

And since it was related to family, I decided to use stacked bowls in order to express their numbers.

And from there I wanted to talk about the low domestic rates with the number from NEA, and in order to express the relevance of the number, I decided to go with a group of cans to show what the statistic would mean. I decided to use the colour contrast, as well the smiley face on the cans to show contrast.

Last but not least, I decided to go a statistics with the largest number to depict how much actually waste we are producing every year. I decided to use the plastic food container to draw comparisons to the olympic swimming pool.

I also decided to add signposts in order to allow viewers to move through the graphics in addition to colours.

Here’s my final design!

After feedback, I tried to edit the design again for a bit, this time increasing the family size, as  well as tried to take out odd gaps but following the composition that has been suggested by the class.

I aso added in a household at the back to further make sure that I am addressing the issue of lack of recycling at home by families.

This project helped me learn a lot about how to make surveys, and as well as how to put those results into a compelling graphic with organised numbers and statistics which I believe I still have a lot to improve on. :,D