Project Overview
Resourceful is a service system for recapturing used personal consumer electronics after their initial use phase. The purpose of this project was to investigate a technology-enabled and service-oriented solution for managing the life cycle of personal consumer electronics.
My Role
This project features my skills in Industrial Design and Service Design. This was an individual project.
Timeline
4 weeks, 2020
Tools
Fusion 360, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator
The Problem
The e-waste
challenge
Ineffective recycling programs
Up to 80% of electronic waste fails to be collected and recycled at the end of life [UN report].
Surging resource entropy
Unsuccessful recapture of e-waste is causing significant loss of scarce and valuable materials.
It’s only just beginning
The volume of e-waste is steadily increasing. The amount of global e-waste production is projected to grow by 8% per year.
The Solution
Reclaim over recycle
The smarter R’s
Remanufacturing, refurbishing, reconditioning, and repairing electronics radically increases resource efficiency. Recycling should be a last resort.
Making the used, anew
The industrial remanufacturing, refurbishing, and reconditioning processes can retain or increase the value of used electronics and extend the active use phase of a device.
The system is crucial
Reclaiming used electronics back into the market requires a robust system to track, retrieve, evaluate, and produce devices for secondary markets.
Opportunities Identified
Agile lifecycle
management
Value added
Reclaiming used electronics from consumers offers district opportunities to provide new products, services, and support, improving the overall user experience.
Pre-decisional return
Using NFC technology to track active devices in the cloud, market data, and digital twin simulation, a system can determine the optimal time when an active device should be returned considering the economic environmental and technical aspects.
I’ll have it back now
Timing is critical in the rapidly changing electronics market. Incentivizing users to upgrade their device while it still has high market value is key to renewing used devices.
User Research
Affinity Mapping: Top Insights
Insight 1: People tend to hold on to their old electronics that they no longer have any use for.
Insight 2: People use their electronics until they begin to breakdown and are reparable.
Insight 3: It’s difficult and complicated to know what to do with old electronics.
Opportunity 1: Users have a preference for newer devices with better functionality.
Opportunity 2: Users prefer automated kiosk or mail in system to manage old personal electronics.
Journey Mapping
Wen is 31 and lives in the Bay Area. She has a phone registered with Resourceful, and she receives a notification that it’s a good time to trade in her device for a similar device with a better camera. Wen is a foodie and loves sharing pictures of what she cooks up online, so she’s quickly sold on the idea of having a better phone camera.
Ideation: Resourceful Kiosk
User flows: Device collection experience
Reflection
This project challenged me to use secondary and primary research to inform my design decisions. I learned how to recruit research participants outside my network, using a wide variety of social media platforms and groups, which was challenging but rewarding in the end. I honed in on my ability to design survey and interview questions that were easy for participants to respond to, while providing me with deep insights into user behavior that revealed actionable patterns.
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