Counter experiments

Paper cut

User Environmental Impact - Summary

• Highlights the environmental impact of the printing of all users in your organization (ranked)
• Useful for drawing users' attention to their printing habits

My initial idea for this project is setting up an installation to persuade people to stop wasting paper and make a contribution to recycling paper in the school. After discussing with Kah, I am going to focus on the printer. The program called Papercut Kah showed me is quite interesting and really amazing. The most important part Papercut attracts me is it counts each user's environmental impact and shows the appropriated data. However, these data are not showing on the user's computer interface. If my installation is capable to show these data in front of user's eyes, it will be cool. My concept is the data appears beside the credit label while each paper printing out.

Arduino&LED experiment

Infrared sensor is used as a button to control the LED to swich on and off. So that in my installation the sensor will sense the paper when they come out from the printer and send the data to Arduino. The image below shows the circuit board of infrared sensor. Use the 2 points of sound speaker as inout and output plug into the pin2 and GND on Arduino board.

Arduino & LED testing...

LED blinking code:

The input leg of infrared sensor goes into pin2 and output leg goes into GND.


After several experiments on the Arduino & LED, finally got the input and output in the right pin position. At last, the LED was controlled well by the Arduino which was blinking once each time the LED was switched on.

Site visit

1. Start point: Civic center


2. End point: Wellington station

Arduino circuitboard

Connect Arduino board
This is the main material I am going to use during this project. Actually, I have no idea that how to deal with it exactly. It is time to think about what other materials I need for my installation.

Think before you print.

The printer is ready all the time. The paper tran always filled up with paper. We print what we like to print, we print what we need to print.



However, sometimes what we have printed are not exactlly what we need. We didn't think carefully before we print. Then they become waste...
It is easy for us to press the print button when we decide to print document out. When we print at school except the free printer in 401 lab, the most thing we maybe care about is credit balance on our desktop. Each A4 paper costs us 0.05cent. When we print in the school library, we can not see our credit on the desktop, we will be reminded when our credit has been runned out. However, apart from reminding the credit, no reminder tip indicates us to save the paper to save the trees and environment. Think before we print, not just think about the credit but the trees as well.

The tip underneath tells us the document has been sent to the printer, it is in processing.

The credit label shows our credit balance, it is decreased each time we print.

Concept of saving printing paper

Green print
Papercalculator

Reseach-
Paper fact:

• 1 ton of paper = 400 reams = 200,000 sheets¹
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets¹
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly)¹

Printing fact:

• Average cost of a wasted page $0.06²
• Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that's 1,410 wasted pages per year!³
• The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year³
• While 3 out of 4 office workers print from the Internet, 90% of people with a printer at home print Internet content⁴
• 56% of people ages 45-54 print pages from the Internet for their archives, and only 33% of people ages 18-34 do the same⁴

According to these calculate data, I have a question that how to let people know these information directly when they are planning to print out something unnecessary from computer. What can I do through interactive designing with printer to remind them the environmental impact?
In this project, I intend to let users learn the environmental knowledge about papers and get data from the computer screen during the process of printing.

• Provide a simple statement on your e-mail footer such as “Think Before You Print.”
• Provide a green installation including statement beside the printer.

^{Paper tips: THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT}

• Use both sides of the paper. It's called "duplex printing" and it is the single best way to reduce paper use. So choose copiers, digital printers and multifunction devices that can print on both sides of the paper. Add duplex as your "default" mode.
  
• Go digital. Save on postage by sending electronic files and let your recipient decide whether to print them. Replace paper files with electronic ones using the scan-to-file option on multifunction devices.
  
• Be selective: Print what you need when you need it. For example, print only the portion of the report you need, not every page. Preview your print to avoid printing pages with boilerplate. Print on demand. Don't stockpile forms, letterhead, or instructions that will go out of date.
• Recycle. Collect used paper so the fiber can be used again. Recycling the fiber saves trees, reduces energy and water use, requires fewer chemicals, and keeps paper out of landfills.

Map zoom in

During the Alpha presentation, our group has shown the developing ideas and works on our project. The growing trees on map is a way of encouraging game players to do good things for contributing the social society and protecting the environment in the game as well as educating them.

The general idea of growing trees is that when players’ contribution to the environment arrives a certain level such as reducing a ton of carbon pollution, the street or place nearby will be grown a tree as a consequence and they will be visual evidence of your grade record.

Furthermore, following with more and more contribution from the player, the trees will be grown stronger and stronger.
However, if player play as an evil character during the later game process, the trees will be reduced and even cleared.