thewasteland.work is a living archive, documenting and representing everyday personal household waste and an extension of the project “First 100 Days”.
It is designed in a way that it can scale from single-person waste data collection to the emergence of positive group dynamics of collecting waste data in a community. The project explores interfaces to a virtual environment supporting multiple users and we encourage and facilitate long-term engagement with the archive. These interfaces include the real-time personal waste data visualization and future waste prediction to support micro-actions and reactions towards environmental concerns; and extend the ways in which users’ waste data are represented for each other.
thewasteland.work designs three mechanisms to raise users’ motivation and support continuity:
(1) input waste data as personal entries whereas paying particular attention to the issues of anonymity,
(2) the visualization of group waste dynamics that can help individuals reflect on and alter their own actions, and
(3) the predicted possibilities that can raise continuous motivation for individuals to document the waste data (this section currently is work-in-progress).