I am honored to be a judge and advisor to this little product of ours, and I must admit I was skeptical we’d get such great community submissions from our call-to-action on jovoto!

Now, I didn’t feel like we had any one blow-away submission that by itself would address the paper cup waste problem. But the submissions were clustered in certain theme areas, that — if combined — might really start to make a difference, not just with reducing paper cup waste, but also with visibility into sustainability issues more broadly. Which was a goal of the project all along!

Plus, there were 400+ submissions on jovoto from people all over the world! How did our modest project garner such attention and concern from the community? I’m quite impressed, not only by the quality of the submissions but also by jovoto as a platform.

So, here’s how I saw the submissions clustering around a few themes:

• Change the cup, not people’s behavior. We know that people get stuck in habits that are hard to break or unrealistic to try to change. So one solution is to let people keep doing what they do, but solve the paper cup waste problem along the way. To me, the best way to do this is through affordable biodegradable cups (period) — not through a redesigned travel mug.
• Incentivize people to bring their own mug. Part of the reason we’re having this design challenge is that people forget to bring travel mugs with them for to-go coffee.
• Encourage people to purchase drinks “for here”. The idea here is to reduce waste by using ceramic mugs at coffee shops — but I don’t believe this will work at scale, especially with people’s hectic, rushed, multitasking lives. Sadly, we drink our coffee t0-go.
• Move to a borrow and deposit model. This was a popular theme — that we could borrow a reusable mug from one shop, carry it with us, and return it to another shop when we’re done.
• Provide smart rewards card (e.g., embedded in RFID chips, bar codes). We’re adding technology to all other parts of our lives — why not to our coffee too? But really, the idea here is that we incentivize people to move to a different model of to-go coffee if, say, the cup remembered your favorite drink, had your debit card, and automatically “punched” your reward card. And maybe tweeted and checked you into Foursquare on your behalf too!
• Share the community’s behavior publicly. This could be done by creating some visual of how other people in the community are contributing to less waste (from an art installation to a chalkboard with a tally of paper cups saved per day). Another interesting idea was one where your free coffee comes after 10 other people have brought travel mugs with them today. So you benefit from the community’s good behavior — in a pay-it-forward model.

And from all these awesome ideas I had to vote on my top three! It was a difficult task, but I was looking for solutions that would work across coffee purveyors (e.g., not just for Starbucks), for a wide audience of people with different backgrounds and daily habits, and that would encourage sustainable behavior beyond just coffee drinking (like through providing visibility into community efforts to recycle, reduce, reuse.)

I was just one judge among many (about 15-20), but altogether I feel good that we decided on winners that captured the spirit of the contest. The winners will be announced at our awards ceremony in NYC on Thursday, June 17 at 3:00 EST (21:00 CEST). Join us live at http://bit.ly/betacuplive where we’ll be announcing:

• the top 5 ideas as selected by the community
• the top submissions and overall winner as selected by our jury

As always, thanks for your support and, please, drink sustainably!

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It’s been said that design shapes behavior; and in user experience (UX) design, behavior informs design which shapes behavior. We can almost taste the tail of the snake in its own mouth.

We have often heard that design can change the world for the better; that to design a cleaner, more sustainable future is not just in our power, but a moral imperative – since often times, we designers are part of the problem. But sometimes, setting and exploring the problem space is the hardest part.

One problem space worthy of exploration is with disposable paper cups. 58 billion paper coffee cups are thrown away every year; most of them aren’t recyclable. There are some efforts at reducing this waste — travel mugs, compostable cups — but at the end of the day, Americans are drinking more and more coffee out of non-recyclable paper cups on the go.

Is it possible to solve the paper cup problem?

We think that this is just the kind of problem space that members of the interaction design community could get excited about and contribute to. By integrating our unusual talents across many fields, our understanding of real human needs and behaviors, our passion for craftsmanship, and a systemic approach to creative problem solving, we have a unique vantage point that we’re hoping to tap in solving this problem.

The betacup project was founded in May 2009 with the goal of reducing the number of non-recyclable cups that are thrown away every year — going beyond a simple reusable coffee mug that we know aren’t that convenient, widely used, or valued.

We decided that while we might have a few good ideas, lots of talented people drink coffee everyday and they have thought about this problem too. So we came up with the betacup challenge as a way to get a lot more of us working on the problem. We invite you to submit ideas but also to comment and rate others’ ideas, and engage in discussions with other betacup  community members and contest jurors.

Join us and learn more about the betacup challenge, as well as the $20,000 in prize money that will be rewarded to the winning ideas.

Be part of our team!

PS: For some great background on the use of design thinking and bodystorming used at Overlap09, which was our initial exploration of the disposable cup problem space, check out this post with video of bodystorming service design.

Will | @semanticwill
Brynn | @brynn

I’m flattered that anyone would take notice of Papel! My goal in drawing the comic was to raise awareness of the problem with paper cup waste. I didn’t realize until after my conversation with Jennifer that comics are also a great way of getting a message across to children, who influence their parents in turn! Jennifer made this known when she mentioned that her 11-year old and 2-year old were carrying around a printed-out copy of Papel. OMG. So flattered!

There may be a future for Papel yet…

The protagonist in my comic strip is one of these disposed-of paper cups. Papel, the paper cup, is brought up in a warehouse, gets transitioned to a coffee shop, bought by a consumer, drunk from, and then trashed. This is his story, and I hope it makes you think twice the next time you buy your coffee to-go.

All my comics can be found on my scribd account.

Papel the Paper Cup

The betacup Bodystorming Session – Overlap 09 from The betacup on Vimeo.

“I grabbed a cup of instant from the hospitality table on the second morning of orientation. It was piping hot and I was in a hurry, so I stuck an ice cube in, but then a friend hailed me and began chatting; by the time we parted, I was holding a cup of watery lukewarm coffee.” –Anonymous (F, 18-24 year-old student from Virginia)

As we learn more about coffee drinking behaviors — the practices around buying and consuming coffee — the better we can tailor the design of a so-called “betacup.”

Krista Sanders, an original member of our team from Overlap’09, has the following reflections on user-centered design and our approach to coming up with a practical solution to the “paper cup problem”:

1. Behavior influences design. Identifying current behavioral patterns provides a solid launch point from which we can design improvements to the existing workflow or process.
2. Relevance increases adoption. By understanding a user’s basic tasks and goals, we are more likely to create potential solutions that not only adhere to, but also enhance the overall experience.
3. The Convenience Monster MUST be appeased. Centering the design process around even the simplest of user expectations is one of the most important requirements for achieving a successful design.

I apologize that it’s not the shortest survey. Thank you in advance!

Now you might ask: but isn’t paper recyclable? I, too, thought paper cups were recyclable, and thinking back to my behaviors, I’m almost positive that I’ve been dropping used paper cups in the recycling bin. Unfortunately, most paper cups are made with a wax lining on the interior making them NON-RECYCLABLE! If you happen to live in an uber-eco-friendly city like San Francisco, your “paper” cups may actually be compostable — but that’s another thing.

On the first day of Overlap09, Toby Daniels presented this very basic problem: disposable paper cups carry a heavy environmental burden, from the way they’re created to the way they’re just simply thrown away. At the same time, they’re super convenient for consumers — I walk into Starbucks or my favorite local Blue Bottle Coffee and my coffee is presented in a disposable paper cup unless I bring my own travel mug (or occasionally they have ceramic mugs for dining in). Blue Bottle actually doubles up on paper cups, the outer one serving as a hot sleeve.

Is it possible to solve the paper cup problem? How can we reduce our consumption of non-recyclable, non-compostable papers cups which have so widely infiltrated American society?

I quickly joined this weekend-long project as part of a 5-6 person team with the hope of brainstorming and prototyping possible solutions. I’m sharing our experience to illustrate the value of a user-centered design process — that effective designs will work within existing user behaviors to enact shifts in practice. In fact, this was possible even though we only had 1-2 days to tackle this problem, and even though we were unable to observe coffee consumers in their normal routines. (There were plenty of coffee consumers in our crowd…all of whom were drinking from the terribly ugly, small, and poorly made non-recyclable paper cups that the Asilomar conference grounds kindly provided. See cups —>.)

One woman approached me at the end of the weekend: “That paper cup problem, that’s a hard one. When I first heard the idea presented I thought ‘good luck’ to the poor souls who take that on. That’s gonna be impossible to solve.”

And so it might be; but that very challenge was the thing that drew me to the project. It was also a physical, tangible artifact that was deeply embedded in people’s work practices and social cultures, another thing that I felt suited to study given my training in distributed cognition and ethnography.

We had a four-pronged strategic approach to this problem (which albeit emerged organically):

First, the team went on an hour-long walk outdoors, with each of us carrying a cup to immerse ourselves in the problems with both paper cups and travel mugs. But the outdoors part was key because, for us to remain as a group, we had to face each other almost in a circle, we practiced deliberate turn-taking (giving everyone a chance to chime in), and we weren’t constrained by computer screens or white boards. We literally just bounced around ideas in a semi-structured manner. We explored everything from the pros and cons of existing solutions to the practices that consumers engage in through the act of purchasing and drinking coffee. What emerged were a few threads with design principles that contributed to the majority of our final prototype.

Second, we let those ideas bounce around privately until the next day. While at first I was disappointed that our return to the retreat center meant we were launching into a new exercise, the next day I realized that having time to digest all the various ideas that were proposed let the few really promising ones percolate to the forefront of our minds. Therefore the next day, we were fresh and ready to go with the best ideas from the lot.

Third, on the second day we began constructing a user survey that we will put on Mechanical Turk to get a mass of data from coffee drinkers. The act of composing a survey, however, made us focus deeply on the issues surrounding the practice and culture of consuming coffee. We talked a lot about the context in which coffee is consumed. Are people buying coffee with their coworkers (as a social practice) or are they drinking solo? What other things do people carry when they purchase coffee? At what time of day does coffee consumption occur? Morning time might suggest it’s part of a regular routine (which would require certain product designs); afternoon might suggest that it’s part of a work-place practice (which would require alternative designs).

Finally, we used a practice called bodystorming to illustrate both the problem and our proposed solution within a coffee shop setting. Dennis Schleicher introduced us to the bodystorming practice earlier in the weekend. Our bodystorm was really a live demonstration (think: a short play), but we presented it in quite a hurry, had to improvise several scenes, and were subject to audience questioning afterwards. All of these things actually led to a better understanding of the problem and solution space! [Aside: some tips on bodystorming.]

Our solution looked something like this: reusable travel mugs already exist (I personally have several), but people are not diligent about carting them around. This is probably true in part because they’re bulky, so we can propose a collapsible, pocket-size mug. However, structural integrity aside, pocket-sized reusable mugs may still not be a sufficient solution. Users are lazy, unlikely to change their behavioral practices — yet for a real solution to take hold, it will have to change behaviors in some way. The best approach to this, in my opinion, is to fit within existing practices and provide incentive structures that encourage a certain type of behavior.

When we were thinking about what coffee consumers’ incentives might be, three issues emerged:

1) many coffee shops give out punch cards where you can buy nine and get the tenth free;
2) to-go users are often busy, rushed, or have things in their hands, making coin (and even credit card) transactions less than convenient;
3) coffee shops often get your order wrong, especially if you’re the triple decaf caramel soy latte with whip.

Could we provide a “smart” collapsible travel mug that provided simple solutions with these three issues in mind?

Our mug (a “betacup”) will therefore have a digital chip on the underside which serves both as the punch card and the debit card, and has a mechanism for remembering your drink. It could remember several drinks (which could vary by time of day) — and you’d be able to add or delete drinks at the shop.

The solution continues: when you enter your participating coffee purveyor, there would be an “Espresso Line” for betacup users. When you arrive at the cash register, there will be a surface for placing your mug which would both read in your preferred drink order, debit your card, and you customer loyalty points, leaving you hands-free to tend to your crying baby or seal a business deal on the phone. Your only wait would be for the baristas to prepare the drink.

Of course, this is an early solution, a result of just a weekends-worth of brainstorming and prototyping. But it’s also a demonstration of how user-centered design thinking can drive solutions to “paper cup problems.” The betacup isn’t just made out of a new type of material, with a new form factor, with a personalizable exterior — although it can also be all of those things. It is a design that tries to work within existing behaviors to enact a shift in practice. Understanding users and the context of practice are hugely important parts of the design process.