This was a great group project as part of Northumbria University's Design for Industry course. With this project we wanted to find a fun way of affecting people's behaviour. The amount of global human waste is increasing rapidly and climate action is still slow, so we decided to tackle the issue of littering. How can you convince the public to dispose of their litter responsibly?



Bins in the public domain are often bland and uninspiring to look at and so are largely hidden away or ignored, which contributes to the litter problem we have in cities today. How could we add character and fun all while communicating with the public about litter positively? Our idea was to create a sentient bin that could communicate with the public, allowing them to interact with it directly. Through this bin we hoped that people would think more positively about putting things in the bin.



For our final product we created two bins. The gray bin (Bertie) was the one that we drove around the city, intimidating the public with its grumpy voice and erratic animatronic eyes. The public loved it, and we seemed to brighten up people's days if nothing else. We ended up creating a second bin (Belinda) that we used in a christmas-style advert. The advert showed Bertie creating his own love from the litter that he collected in his day to day office job.