Vibrant Streets
This was done as a pitch proposal to Manchester City Council and the idea was selected as the winning idea to be taken forward and implemented in the city.
Tackling cigarette litter in Manchester
The Manchester City Council was facing a huge problem with litter. Tasked with solving the problem of cigarette litter, we were posed the question: How do we encourage smokers to properly dispose of their cigarettes?
Understanding the problem
In 2007, indoor smoking was banned in all of the UK. This resulted in a drastic change in behaviour, as this meant that smokers now had to smoke outside, usually in front of stores. Today, 977,000 cigarettes are smoked daily in Manchester and 65% of these cigarettes are littered. This is enough to fill 8 football fields with cigarette butts per day.
Smokers have been pushed outdoors. It is now more difficult for them to dispose of cigarettes, making it easier to litter.
The Solution: Vibrant Streets
Vibrant Streets is an initiative created to enable smokers to be responsible for the place that they live in. This is done by partnering with the local businesses, allowing them to play a part, providing them with the tools necessary for this change to happen.
In order to create a human-centered solution, we have to keep our users at the forefront of our considerations. An ashtray was designed to be positioned along business storefronts, a place that smokers currently already frequent.
By partnering with the businesses for this initiative, it helps maintain cleanliness of their storefront and allows smokers to dispose of their cigarette butts properly.
This is first launched in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, and the artwork commissioned for the bin will be done by a local street artist. The Northern Quarter is known for its trendiness, artistic character and unique street art and the ashtray was reflective of that.
It is important for the ashtray design to be easy to spot because in observation and research, existing black bins were found to be easily missed out.
After the initiative takes off, it expands into other neighbourhoods. In places like Chinatown, the artwork on the ashtray would be representative of it, such as an oriental chinese dragon, or for gay village, a rainbow ashtray.
This allows for each neighbourhood to have their own unique identity and creates a sense of community and belonging among the people.
Rapid Prototyping
It was critical to test the prototype as soon as possible to prove whether or not it worked, further understand user concerns, and find potential flaws and areas for improvement.
The first prototype was built with a black tube, a wire and a sign. It was placed outside an office building with a high traffic of smokers. We observed how people interacted with the ashtray and also had an undercover spy from the team listening to their conversations. 👀
After the prototype test, there were some concerns from both users and our client, things such as vandalism, theft, emptying of the ashtray etc. The prototype was further refined to resolve these concerns.
Feedback
“This is really helpful, since we already spend time and money on cleaning up cigarette butts.”
— Staff of a local F&B business
“Cigarettes are our largest single litter problem and this idea gave it a city feel. We like that the product can be tailored to different areas of the city, and would showcase local artists’ work.”
— Emma from the ‘Keep Manchester Tidy’ campaign, the Manchester City Council
This project was done in collaboration with Gabriel Sinico, Joudy Loo, Marcos Arruda & Hannah Simpson.