Citizen Centred Services: New Forms in Public Space Recycling

When designing for citizens, municipalities often focus on the back end infrastructure of services while ignoring the user experience. This can lead to a lack of engagement by citizens and improperly used services. Contemporary issues facing cities today such as waste reduction, and other challenges associated with living in a dense urban core, reinforce the need for a drastic change in the way that people live, work and co-organize as supported by their local government. A two year design research partnership with a local governing body explored the role of participatory design in the creation of a service touch-point aimed at decreasing contamination in the streams of waste that are recycled in public city spaces. It considers how principles of behavior change can be utilized in this inquiry for designing services that are used by the general public in an urban context. During the course of the project, participatory methodologies are used to facilitate conversations between municipal waste coordinators and designers. Through user observations, ethnographic research, co-creation and user testing this thesis argues for the need for participatory design to create effective services for cities. Through explorations of form, iconography, and systems this inquiry has culminated in the design of a streetscape recycling station and a human centered framework for municipalities called ‘citizen centered services’.