A Service Design Principle to help public services avoid trash to be everywhere
I’m walking in the lovely Montbenon Park in Lausanne, Switzerland. There the city installed some temporary water fountains. This city really cares about its citizens. But as I’m getting nearer to the water fountain, I notice something weird.
People are really creative with their trash. Because the top of the water fountain is flat, people leave their rubbish there...
It’s something I notice again and again around the city. When the surface is perfectly flat, people leave stuff on it. But when the surface is steep, they can’t really leave something on it, so the trash ends up more quickly in the real waste.
This situation reminds me of the term affordances that I first learned about in the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Objects tell us how to use them: when something is flat, we want to put stuff on it. When something is steep, we don’t want to put stuff on it.
So when it comes to public services, maybe take a minute or two to verify that the objects in the public space don’t say to people: “I’m a good place to leave your garbage on”
Little side notes
This is the very first shitty draft for this new Service Design Principle.
