The Service

Rotwell is an all-encompassing food waste management service that partners with property developers to provide easy and rewarding compost solutions for Multiple Dwelling Units (MDUs). Rotwell installs and maintains infrastructure, from compost chutes, community green spaces and produce pantries, to in-unit tablets that enable renters to compost effectively and engage with their community.

My Role

<aside> 💡 For a graduate project spanning 12 weeks in Fall 2023, I collaborated with a team of four students. In my role as lead designer, I spearheaded the conceptualization, design, and specification of our solution. Additionally, I played a key role as a researcher, conducting user studies to gather insights that informed our design decisions. The final deliverables included a prototype, service design map, and specification document.

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Challenge

How might we make composting more accessible for renters in MDUs through enhanced building infrastructure, reducing their skill and knowledge gaps, and fostering a sustainable community within the building?

Desired Outcomes

Project Phases

Generative Research

Why does composting matter to us? Inaction on composting contributes significantly to climate change. Composting diverts our organic waste from landfills, which lowers greenhouse emissions, making it an essential practice for a more sustainable future. Soil is the foundation of agriculture, and compost-enriched soil is vital for food production.

• 🏡 Residential buildings account for 20% of US greenhouse gas emissions.

• 🌱 While 72 percent of Americans do not compost their food waste, 67 percent of these non-composters would be willing to if it were more convenient to do so in their community.

• 🍔 Individual food waste has also increased significantly, with American consumers wasting 50% more on average today than in 1970.

Given inefficient home waste management’s significant contribution to the global climate crisis, we are aiming to explore methods for streamlining effective waste practices.

Definitions

Introducing key definitions in our space to understand our service and its impact:

• 👩🏻‍🌾 Composting: This is the process of turning food waste and other organic material into fertilizer that can enrich soil and plants. Think of it as similar to recycling: leftover food grown with compost soil can be processed into more compost that will grow other food and repeat the cycle.

• 🏢 MDU/MDUs: MDUs, or multi-dwelling units, are separate housing units in a single building. Common examples of MDUs are apartment buildings, duplexes, and mixed-use properties.

• 🌳 Community Gardens & Green Spaces: They are plots and lands maintained and cultivated by a collective of people. For the purposes of this project, we ideated an MDU fitted with community gardens and green spaces primed to grow produce.

Stakeholders

Our initial assumptions were related to our own experiences composting Seattle, buildings lack infrastructure and space to facilitate composting. We created a stakeholder map to better understand who has a stake in our problem space.

Primary actors: Individuals who are mildly interested in sustainability Secondary actors: Neighbourhood and neighbours Tertiary actors: The environment

Contextual Inquiry

To help reveal unconscious data, observe behaviour at home and explore the physical environment in which people’s everyday process towards creating and disposing of compostables primarily takes place. We conducted contextual inquiry interviews with 4 participants who live in greater Seattle area. Our team hopes to better understand how people manage their food waste and compostables and what are the barriers for adopting sustainable practices.

Insights

1. Inadequate Infrastructure in MDUs: MDUs often lack proper composting infrastructure, making it difficult for residents to participate effectively.

“My building just doesn’t have a food waste bin. I’ve been meaning to ask my building manager about it…” - Participant 3

No composting services

1. Knowledge and Skills Gap: There is a significant knowledge and skills gap surrounding composting, leading to confusion, inefficiencies, and reliance on intuition.

“If I think my disposal can break it down I’ll just throw everything in there” - Participant 3

“I never use my disposal for food waste, I always make sure to put everything in my compost bag” - Participant 4

1. Overemphasis on Individual Responsibility: Current composting efforts are too focused on individual residents and do not foster community-wide solutions.

“I want to make my individual contributions feel more meaningful” - Participant 4

Waste chute puts all food waste into trash

Ideation

Once we pinned down the major problems to tackle, the design direction became more clear and we articulated this with design principles that guided our solution.

🫶 Encourage: Greater adoption of sustainable practices.

📋 Minimize: The physical and cognitive load of composting.

🚖 Provide: Ongoing support.

🚀 Create: A sense of community through engagement with green space.

🎧 Clarify: The tangible impact of composting.

Brainstorming

Starting with our refined design challenge, each team member of our team brainstormed 30 unique ideas each. This brainstorming yielded a total of 120 potential solutions, covering a wide spectrum of possibilities.

We then organized these ideas into themes, sorting through the pile to identify those that best resonated with our design principles. After discussion, dot voting and affinity mapping; we narrowed down our choices.

Future Envisioning

The Verdant

The year is 2043. The city is Seattle, Washington. Imagine a city block in Capitol Hill with two tall residential buildings, each with 100 apartment units. These buildings sit in an L-shape, with garden rooftops connected by a curved bridge lush with hanging greenery. The bridge overlooks a courtyard filled with more garden boxes and fruiting trees; all are bursting with produce sustained by residents’ compost.

This is The Verdant. This MDU building was conceived in 2023 to be one of the first community-based, compost-centric residential buildings to further Seattle’s Zero Waste vision.

Top Ideas

🗑️ Compost Chute

Rotwell partners with builidngs to to provide a fully-integrated food waste management system, working in partnership with local farms to provide residents with discounts and CSA boxes.

🌳 Community Garden

This solution aims to provide free access to fresh vegetables, promote effective waste management, and build a sense of community among residents engaged in gardening and composting activities.

Community Garden Scenario 🌳

The multi-dwelling unit provides a community garden that incorporates a rooftop greenhouse and raised beds, providing tenants with free, freshly harvested vegetables.

The building manages residents' organic waste through in-condo facilities, including organic chutes and worm bins.

Additionally, it produces nutrient-rich soil for the garden and educates tenants about harvests, storage, and edible components.

Composting tools, such as bins and refills, are supplied to support waste management. Excess compostables are given to partnering facilities for processing.

Service Blueprint

Mapping using sticky notes, step by step what a renter is going through when they compost. A good depiction on where the interactions encounter our Rotwell Tablet. ADD STICKY NOTES

Prototype & Test

Key Paths

We identified the key-pathways that we thought is necessary to showcase what Rotwell can do and they were:

1. Ask Rotwell is it Compostable?

2. Shift Sign-Up

3. Redeem Produce

Ver. 1 Prototype

Utilizing the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) method, we iterated on each participant's feedback before testing the next participant.

Participants interacted with a rudimentary version of the product made of paper wireframes, simulating basic functionalities. This hands-on exercise allowed us to identify usability issues and gather initial feedback on the concept's overall appeal and effectiveness.

Interface Design

We implemented feedback from the paper prototype tests, and added additional functionality by providing a learning experience, and refining our voice assistant and volunteering shift as well as point redemption functionality.

What did I learn?

One big takeaway for me was the power of teamwork. Working closely with my team, I saw how pooling our ideas and perspectives led to better solutions. We also learned about the iterative design process; it's not about getting it perfect on the first try, but about refining through multiple iterations.

Lastly, I learned the importance of being ready to let go of ideas that aren't working out. Sometimes, it's better to abandon them early and focus on what's more promising and feedback-driven.

Next steps

• Further Iteration: Perform evaluative testing with our high-fidelity prototype

• Rewards: Build out rewards platform and point system to increase renter motivation for participating in composting

• Property Incentives: Develop incentives for property developers to choose Rotwell for their buildings, e.g. sustainability certifications akin to LEED