Milestone 2 - Contextual Inquiry
In progress ...
We began exploring the problems of consumption and disposal by talking to a variety of people involved in all angles of the issue. Our group has conducted an online survey as well as several more in depth face to face interviews to explore the issues of consumption, re-use, and disposal as well as people's attitudes about buying, lending, and borrowing items.
Phase I - Online Survey
The group compiled a list of questions to ask individuals to discern their buying, lending, borrowing and disposal habits of consumer goods. The questions were posted using Survey Gizmo and participants were recruited through several email lists. Survey respondants were asked if they would be willing to be interviewed further and asked to leave contact information so that we could schedule this. To date, 95 surveys have been completed.
Phase II - Face to Face Interviews with Consumers
Survey respondents who were willing to be contacted further were interviewed about more in depth on the issues of consumption, re-use, lending, borrowing, and disposal. Participants were asked about their experiences with selling and donating items through charities and web services.
Phase III - Face to Face Interviews with Re-Sale, Recycling and Re-Use Employees & Volunteers
The group toured several local recycling, re-use and resale stores in the Ann Arbor area. We interviewed employees and volunteers to learn about what goods were coming in, what was needed, what got rejected and what the demand level was for re-used goods.
The Evolution of Our Project
Our initial investigations have drastically changed our project focus. Our original premise - that a key solution was encouraging sharing among small communities has transformed.
Now that we've completed 10 interviews with a variety of stakeholders we are developing an understanding of how we could make a larger impact on the local community.
Key findings to date
- There are many operational and logistic issues effecting local resale locations
- Supply of used items in this area is greater than the demand
- The community is eager to donate items but only if it's easy to do
- There are many reasons why people don't buy used, including lack of awareness of the option, not caring enough to change their consumption habits, and not knowing which items were available where.
- There is confusion among the community about what organizations accept which items
- There is a lack of coordination among resale organizations
- Different organizations have different motivations. Some are financially motivated while others are environmental. This leads to friction among the groups.
While we will be following up with some of the respondents over the next few days, we feel the group has definitely gathered a rich supply of information that will be useful in the next phases of the project.
