Brown University Design Journal, Part 1: Dining Hall Trash Cans

The dining room at Josiah’s, a late-night eatery at Brown University.

Right from the moment you arrive on campus, Brown University’s commitment to sustainability shines. From short-term projects such as the Green Move-In initiative to long-standing institutions such as the Energy and Environmental Office, it’s clear that Brown has placed itself in a unique position to provide a model for environmental sustainability for the future.

But even after all of the effort Brown invests in upholding its sustainability goals, one of the most commonly used interfaces by which students can directly influence their environmental future has been designed in a way that can negate all of the awareness initiatives Brown has created for this important issue.

The central waste and recycling bins at Jo’s.

Josiah’s (Jo’s for short), a late-night, on-campus eatery, relies on the containers seen in the photo above for trash and recycling disposal in its dining room. In an aesthetic sense, they’re great! The olive green finish and wood paneling fits well with the American diner theme. Additionally, it makes sense from a practical standpoint that they would be placed in a high-traffic area so that anyone could easily reach them.

But after eating dinner at Jo’s a couple times, you might notice something odd about these cans:

Uh-oh…but that was a recyclable product!

As shown in the GIF, people on the other side of the bins can throw their waste without knowing which hole corresponds to the recycling or the trash.

Why is this the case?

1. Without looking at the signs, it’s impossible to tell which bin corresponds to trash or recycling (or whether there’s recycling at all).

The placement of the signs means they can’t be seen from this angle. It also doesn’t help that the signs for the bins are facing towards the side of the dining hall with lower traffic (the backside of the bins face towards the larger side of the room).

Also, the holes at the top look the same for each bin, which doesn’t convey the fact that some of them have different purposes.

2. The lack of known iconography and meaningful color scheme makes it too easy to mix up the bins.

Here’s some close-ups of the signs on Jo’s bins:

While it’s certainly important to know where specific items go, it’s hard to figure out which sign to look at first because of the high information density. Additionally, the small font size of the titles, similar color schemes (brown and dark blue blend together if not looked at closely), and lack of meaningful iconography make it hard to immediately see which sign users should focus on. Most importantly, the overwhelming nature of the signs can thwart Brown’s goal to educate people about proper waste management if people decide that reading them is too much work.

3. It’s too easy to throw things away without ever identifying the bins.

Because of the “open-air” nature of the bins, diners never have to actually look at the signs and identify each bin before disposing of their trash. While it’s certainly more efficient to leave the bins open on all sides so users can throw their trash in from any direction, efficiency should not be prioritized over learnability in this scenario.

And that’s really where the problem lies. Regardless of memorability, if students are not “onboarded” in such a way that educates them about correct usage of the bins, they’ll never realize they actually have to learn something about them. They don’t know what they don’t know.

In order to resolve some of these issues, Jo’s can take a cue from some of the other dining halls at Brown:

• The Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center uses single-table arrays of bins (much like Jo’s) but doesn’t have the same visually impeding walls and uses varying hole shapes to reinforce each bin having a different purpose.

Different sized holes make it easy to identify each container even though they’re all on the same table.

• The Sharpe Refectory placed one-way covers on top of their compost bins to ensure that people saw the sign (especially important since composting is less common).

You can only throw things into the compost bin from one side.

• The same dining hall also places trash and recycling signs at eye level to heighten their visibility. Also, a combination of easily recognizable beige and blue containers and different hole shapes reliably communicates the purpose of each bin.

Recognizable colors and visible signage are a match made in heaven.