RECYCLE BITS (mobile application)

UX Tools: Sketch, Flinto, Illustrator, and Photoshop
Desktop App: 8 hours
Mobile App: 2 weeks

The Problem

Globant Seattle Artificial Intelligence Hackathon
The Globant Seattle Artificial Intelligence Hackathon is to explore creative uses for “AI As A Service” (AIaaS) offerings and the ease with which intelligent capabilities can now be added to everyday applications.

AI As A Service (AIaaS)
Artificial intelligence services often involve in-depth mixtures of technologies including Big Data, Machine Learning, custom model definition, as well as underlying supporting structures like Neural Networks. Due to the inherent complexity of AI implementations, major cloud service providers like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon now offer commoditized implementations of AI. These are packaged and offered as cloud services accessible to broad audiences who don’t need formal backgrounds in AI for effective usage. Our event will focus on Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Microsoft Cognitive Services
Microsoft’s intent with these services is to enable developers to easily add intelligent features to applications, making them increasingly able to see, hear, speak, understand, and even begin to reason. Inexpensive, easy to use, powerful, and very well documented, the services are ideal for use in a short-duration Hackathon setting.

The Solution

The Vision (analyzes images and video) and Knowledge (analyzes information to form recommendations and relationships) API’s from Microsoft Cognitive Services were selected to create Recycle Bits. Using theses two API’s to scan images for recycling material, Recycle Bits can then sort these items into the correct waste bin.

"It takes 95 percent less energy to make a can from recycled aluminum than from virgin bauxite ore."
~ National geographic

Research

Plastic - A whopping 91% of plastic isn’t recycled; most plastic will end up in landfills with a portion falling into the ocean. Plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade, so most of it still exists in some form. 

Glass - Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly without loss in quality or purity - something few food and beverage packaging options can claim.

Aluminum - Aluminum is 100 percent recyclable and retains its properties indefinitely. The U.S. industry can recycling rate is approximately 67 percent.

Landfills - A landfill site is a site for the disposal of waste materials by burial. It is the oldest form of waste treatment (although the burial part is modern; historically, refuse was just left in piles or thrown into pits). Historically, landfills have been the most common method of organized waste disposal and remain so in many places around the world.

Some landfills are also used for waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling). Unless they are stabilized, these areas may experience severe shaking or soil liquefaction of the ground during a large earthquake.
Source: wikipedia.org

Garbage Patches - Most people know of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, dues to its massive size. Currently it is twice the size of Texas and growing. There are 4 additional garbage patches around the world that vary in size as noted below.

Sketching / Wireframes

With only eight hours to complete the project, it was decided that the focus would be the desktop. Keeping the design really simple, so that the user could select from uploading or taking a picture.

Development

After feeding nearly a thousand images into the API’s then scrubbing the information we didn’t need, Recycle Bits was able to detect recyclable items with 67% accuracy. Currently Recycle Bits is able to detect; glass, plastic and aluminum among waste.

With future iterations the accuracy will be closer to 100% along with being able to search images that have thousands of objects. In addition Recycle Bits can also be used in fast food locations to provide customers the correct bins in which to put recyclables.

End Results

A five-minute presentation was given on which API’s were used along with coding details. After 20-minute deliberation the judges thanked everyone and announced the winners. The three judges made it clear that the top two applications could have won, but they felt that Recycle Bits came in 2nd place.

With 12 teams out of 20+ finishing the Hackathon, I’m very proud to have finished in the top three. More importantly Recycle Bits helps the environment and makes you money at the same time.

After the Hackathon

After working on this project and doing a ton of research, I felt that I needed to make a mobile version. The desktop worked so well, I can see a future where Recycle Bits is baked into a robot like Boston Dynamic’s SpotMini. Using the SpotMini to run 24 hours a day at a landfill sorting garbage into recycling bins. With nearly $300 million of aluminum alone sitting in landfills, it makes fiscal sense to try and mine landfills.

Updating the Design

With only eight hours in a Hackathon setting, I really didn’t have much time to make a really interesting logo. What I did like about the logo is the circuit board look of the arrows along with the type treatment. I really wanted to keep the eye, but it just made more sense to go with the pulsating brain. This was a nod to our use of AI to sort out the recyclable materials in images. Along with these updates, the color scheme now reflects a more earthy feel.

I selected the typical household items associated with Plastic, Glass, and Aluminum. Along with these icons I assigned a color scheme to apply to these categories for the On Boarding for Recycle Bits.

The desktop version of Recycle Bits used Futura and Arial fonts types with a dark green header and dark blue background. The updated fonts for the mobile application are SF Pro Text and Helvetica these were used for their readability at small sizes and great contrast. The updated colors represent earthy colors in the natural environment.

On Boarding

With the On Boarding process for Recycle Bits, I wanted to show that everything is connected to our environment. As you swipe the background stripe moves along to the next screen seamlessly. Animating the intro slide and the icons was fun, and makes a dull subject a bit more interesting.