Waking up the Sleeping Phones

Stimulating the Recycling of old Phones through Education

Smartphone use is increasing worldwide, and at the same time users are replacing their devices on an average of every 18 to 20 months. The large amount of smartphones made every year requires a lot of resources, energy and raw materials. In the case of the smartphone, when users replace them, they tend to store the old phones in drawers at home. This behaviour prevents the materials to be recycled and put back in the system. Therefore, encouraging users to remove their old phones from drawers would make the consumption of smartphones more sustainable. We propose SeeThru as an educational platform to change this behaviour. SeeThru educates people through games, stories and information, and aims to increases the awareness towards the recycling of old phones. SeeThru is designed to make smartphone users change their behaviour and empower them to actively start recycling their phones.

You can find more detailed information about the design process on the project’s blog.

And you can also check out the research paper here.