unintended consequences – Persuasion | CMU School of Design

Overview

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an exponential increase in delivery in general as people start to avoid leaving their homes for safety. This includes food delivery as well, and one main problem with this exponential increase in food delivery is the excessive use of plastic containers. In fact, the majority of the plastic containers are actually not recyclable because of the contamination from food residue. This means that most of the plastic containers we have recycled are most likely being landfilled, which is a serious problem to start thinking about especially because we are using more delivery plastic containers than we ever had before. In this project, I wanted to do something that can persuade people to somehow participate in settling down this issue of excessive use of plastic containers that cannot be recycled.

Service

I designed a service where a delivery app creates their own eco-friendly package containers to sell as a monthly sponsorship. I’ve created my own delivery service called d ; ECOlivery, but this service can honestly be applied to any other delivery service apps as well. Restaurants will be buying the eco-friendly package containers monthly to use it for their food delivery, but this will also allow restaurants to earn sponsorship as well.

In the app, there is a pop up to notify users that eco-friendly package container service is offered in the application, and there is a separate category just for stores that use eco-friendly packaging. By making a separate category, it allows users to look at what the “eco” category is once more. Restaurants that have bought the monthly eco-friendly package containers from the service app will be sponsored and filtered up to the top of the list for each food category, which will make people look through these stores (that bought and use eco-friendly packaging) first than any other stores in the app.

The main method I’ve used is visual persuasion and framing, where I have offered specific visuals to make people learn about the eco-friendly packaging service (like the pop-up and separate category for “eco”). In fact, the whole concept of using the sales of eco-friendly packaging as a sponsorship to filter stores to be in the top of the list is also a method of persuasion that motives users to look at stores that they see at first glance.

A Speculative Product and Service by Ray Pai [C]

Mulch Monsters are automated composting machines that subvert the common perception of composting in homes. Food waste sent to landfills break down into methane, a greenhouse gas that depletes the ozone layer. An approach to reducing food waste is to encourage composting, which breaks food waste down into mulch. Mulch can be used in community gardens or for your own houseplants. That’s why Mulch Monster is framed as an opportunity to be health conscious and prosocial towards the community.

Mulch Monsters subvert the common misconception that composting smells bad, takes up too much space, and is labor intensive. Insted, it’s compact, automated, and educates users on how to reduce odors. In addition, it encourages behavior change by providing encouraging data through a supplementary app, which shows the quality of the mulch. Lastly, Mulch Monster is designed with the consideration of unintended consequences. With the concern that Mulch Monster makes throwing away food waste TOO fun, the supplementary app encourages users to produce quality mulch instead of large quanitites of mulch.