Encouraging sustainable fashion with a playful recycling system

Abstract

This paper presents the design and study of UNI2BIN, a playful interactive system challenging its users to recycle their textiles so to adopt more sustainable fashion habits. The system initially rewards the user with direct playful interactions when depositing clothes in the recycling machine, followed by dispensing a token granting access to a user specific website further depicting what happens to their recycled clothes. To close the loop, a clothing line is created from the supplied textiles. This paper addresses the design of the system to encourage sustainable fashion and textile awareness amongst young adults, including the sustainability challenges, playful strategy used and the studies that informed the system, namely an interview study with 30 participants between 18 and 25 years old. Furthermore, preliminary lessons learned are presented from the design and evaluation of the system.