AKA “how I became a trash room influencer”.
I live in a building with seven floors, 26 families, and about ~90 tenants. Recently our building went through a renewal and renovation program and got some new facilities from scratch. One of them is our new trash room:
After the sanitation workers are emptying the trash bins, they usually put them back in the trash room with their lids up and open. This is a really helpful gesture which I appreciate, but it has one major issue: It encourages people to throw their trash bags from distance without even entering inside the trash room.
And as you can imagine, on a weekly basis our trash room looks like this, every single time:
The bins on the sides are almost completely empty, while the bins in the center are overloaded. It only makes sense, why would someone want to step inside a smelly room when they can easily play basketbag?
But I wanted to change this behavior. So I thought to run a small experiment without telling anyone, and one morning the tenants woke up to the following situation:
Every trash bin got a scoring mechanic, while the ones in the center were worth 5pt each, then the ones on the sides were 10pt each, and the farthest sides got 15pt each.
The first tenant noted this in the evening and immediately took a photo and shared it with the Whatsapp group of the building, and so our game begin!
Who knew that trash could bring people together like this?
Jokes aside, once we have game mechanics (scoring points) + players, now we get player dynamics (the rules of the game in motion).
And guess what? It seemed to work! Three days after, the new scoring mechanic helped to flatten the curve. This is how one of the middle 5pt trash bins looked like compared to the 10pt trash bins to its sides:
And during this period I also personally encountered two tenants who joked about their scores, which was a wonderful moment. But shortly… someone messed with the configuration.
I assume that, unconsciously, it was a sanitary worker… as a couple of days after the trash bins were emptied I entered the trash room to find the following environment on prod:
Four trash bins with their lids closed, and only three with the high scores were left with their lids up, and placed in the center of the trash room! In front of the main door again…
This is where I decided to stop with the short experiment, as I don’t have real control over it, but from its ~5-day period we can recall some nice lessons about game design:
- People are motivated by goals even when they are completely abstract.
- If you don’t plan ahead for player dynamics, you will get unexpected results.
- The gamified experiment delivered the message of “someone wants us to distribute the garbage equally” better than a textual sign would, as it involved emotions and brought the idea to the people’s attention in a fun and delightful way, hence receiving more cooperation from the tenants.
And the winner? I guess you could say that I’ve achieved my lifelong dream of becoming a trash room influencer. But in all seriousness, the experiment showed me once again that gamification can be a powerful tool for changing behavior, and that sometimes the most ordinary things can spark joy and creativity in unexpected ways.
So go ahead, gamify your life, and who knows — you might just become a trash room influencer too!