Nudge

Persuasion 2019

Chloe, Sherry, Maddie, Ethan, Sharon

Project Brief (Chloe)

For this project, the initial research question was, how can we save paper used by printers shared spaces? Our team mainly focused on reducing paper waste and encouraging recycling within the printing system through pain-points research and prototyping potential nudges to successfully answer the initial research question and impact users’ behavior within the printing system.

Problem Space (Chloe)

The entire campus is expected to participate in Carnegie Mellon’s Recycling Program actively and waste reduction efforts due to the CMU Sustainability Policy. However, since students of Design have unlimited printing quota, easy access to printers, and continuous printing of iteration and prototype we are inclined to waste a massive amount of papers.

In the School of Designs studio spaces, students have full access to HP Laserjet 5200 printers for their design projects. Though these printers are heavily used and necessary for the studio space, problems arise in which students often make misprints, do not print double-sided, and do not recycle their misprints. We set out to nudge these student’s behaviors to be more sustainable. Our goal through our persuasive nudge was to:

1. make students aware of the amount of misprints created in studio spaces

2. encourage students to reuse their misprints

Initial Research (Chloe)

During our initial research we found out 17% of paper is waste, 25% of landfill waste consists of paper, and it takes an average of 5 liters of water to produce one piece of A4 paper.

Focus define (Ethan)

Base on our research from observation, interviews and interactive poster, we have identified two specific directions within the area of sustainable printing: Reducing misprints and promoting reuse of misprints. While both directions will contribute to a more sustainable printing environment, some research insights have informed us that most people have less sense and motivation to reuse misprints produced in the shared space. On the other hand, considering the nature of this project, most ideas for preventing misprints direction will lie within the digital space, which will be more challenging to prototype(modifying printer software) as well as to measure success. Thus, we eventually decided to move forward our project on nudging people on resuing misprints produced in a shared space.

Ideation (Ethan)

During our brainstorming process, We came up with three different ideas base on the focus setting: Misprint Voting Boxes, Printer Slip, and Printing Instruction Poster. We first identified that gamification of the recycling/reuse process may induce people who never recycle paper to start to recycle their misprints. Having one relevant topic question and two to three voting bins with different answers to the question may provide an incentive for people to starting putting their misprints into the bins for reuse(voting for one category) or taking out the misprints(decreasing competing categories). We also found that misprints usually stack on the printer top area. So if we flatten out the printing tray, then it is likely that paper may fall out from the printer and nudges people to recycle or reuse them. Lastly, we noticed that through research not many people know how to properly use the misprints to print on the clean side. So we envision that having clear visuals to demonstrate the process will greatly help people to start learning about the steps.

Iteration (Sharon)

From the previous phase, we were able to identify the ideas we wanted to take further and test with a large group of target audiences.

Idea 1. Tray voting
For our tray voting system, we created a set of three boxes made from foamboard and transparent PVC film. Then, we came up with different ideas/categories that would interest the users, which would ultimately lead to a behavior change to reuse more papers. Here are examples of the categories we implemented:

• Where do you want to work? (Tech, design firm, and startup)
• I need sleep vs. all-nighters

We placed these boxes in the graduate design studio, Junior C studio, and Junior P studios to gather more insights.

Idea 2. Better Instructions
In addition to the trays, we created a printer instruction sheet to lower the number of misprints. From our research, we figured out that the majority of the misprints result from people printing on wrong size paper and unwanted double-sided print jobs, which can be easily prevented with extra steps on the printer setting.

Idea 3. Slip to prevent stacking
For our third idea, we decided to create a physical nudge to prevent papers stacking on the printer. We quickly prototyped a foamboard slip to flatten out the dented area of the printer.

Final Prototyping (Sherry)

We picked two nudges to implement in the final phase of prototyping: voting with misprints and setting up instructions for double-sided printing. The two nudges work as a whole.

Printing instructions set up in front of printer

There are two pages of printing instructions. The one on the left is about how to manually flip the paper to print double-sided pages correctly. We made this diagram because even if some people want to reuse the misprints, they may not be able to print correctly so that the number of misprint increases.

The panel on the right is about how to send double-sided print jobs. Double-sided print seems impossible to many people because of the specific setting of this inkjet printer, however, it is actually achievable through Adobe Acrobat, which is a software most design students have.

We set up the voting trays in two locations: the freshman studio and the graduate studio. For the one in the graduate studio, we made a 3-choice poll, and for freshman studio, we made a 2-choice poll. We were rotating the question/surveys every several days.

For Freshman studio, our surveys include very design freshman related options:

• I need sleep /all-nighters
• Clay / foam
• La Prima / Tazza d’Oro

For the graduate studio, we had more general / environment-related questions:

• Why do you make misprints? the printing system is bad / I’m in a hurry / I need to test different colors and paper sizes
• Where do you want to work? Tech / design firms / startups

Results (Maddie)

After testing our persuasive nudge in three different spaces and in different forms (by different questions), we identified points of both success and failure in our proposed nudge.

After a full week, we collected over 300 misprints. Overall our method was successful in gathering misprints, but it is unclear if users were actively reusing these misprints. We also found that users were more active in participation in the Grad Studio, this could be attributed to the type of work they do, which can include more printing. We were interested to see how much the fidelity of the prototype affected the results; higher fidelity=more participation & attention vs lower fidelity=less participation and destruction of nudge itself.

the most participation we received from a question type (Grad studio)

Moving Forward

Though our nudge was largely successful in making people more aware of misprints and urging them to place them in a communal bin, the participants were not as easily persuaded to reuse those discarded papers.

With this is mind, there are a few aspects of the nudge we would have changed given the chance:

1. Designing the nudge more intentionally, to be more space efficient, to fit in any kind of studio area
2. Adding an “environmental” spin on the signage to give users a better understanding of the importance of reusing paper
3. Creating better “branding” of the nudge to incorporate more persuasive and eye-catching signage/instructions.