Forager: designing location-aware applications for informal waste recyclers in Brazil
Pages 1159 - 1167
Abstract
Informal waste collectors can provide recycling services to developing cities, while cities seek better data collection and stewardship of their waste systems. Mobile applications can mediate this relationship, but must be accessible and adopted by informal workers. Based on past work with recycling cooperatives in Brazil, we built and tested Forager, a web and mobile platform for coops to track their own collection vehicles in real-time and improve coordination and transparency with their private partners and local government. Through observations, workshops, and interviews, we identified simple, error-tolerant, unobtrusive interfaces as ideal for informal work environments. Finally, we discuss how security, workload, and user expectations present unique opportunities and challenges for pervasive urban applications in developing contexts.
References
[1]
M. Medina, The World's Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Consumption and Production. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007.
[2]
A. Scheinberg, "Informal Sector Integration and High Performance Recycling: Evidence from 20 Cities," Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), Manchester, 23, 2012.
[3]
Brazil, "Lei 12305/2010 - Residuos solidos," 2010. {Online}. Available: http://www.trabalhoseguro.com/Leis/Lei_12305_2010.html. {Accessed: 31-Dec-2010}.
[4]
O. Fergutz, S. Dias, and D. Mitlin, "Developing urban waste management in Brazil with waste picker organizations," Environ. Urban., vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 597--608, 2011.
[5]
H. Galperin and J. Mariscal, "Poverty and mobile telephony in Latin America and the Caribbean," Dialogo Reg. Sobre Soc. Inf. DIRSI IDRC, 2007.
[6]
J. Lave and E. Wenger, Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge {England}; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
[7]
J. Roy, "Recent trends in logistics and the need for real-time decision tools in the trucking industry," in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2001, 2001, p. 9.
[8]
B. L. Golden, A. A. Assad, and E. A. Wasil, "Routing vehicles in the real world: applications in the solid waste, beverage, food, dairy, and newspaper industries," Veh. Routing Probl., vol. 9, pp. 245--286, 2002.
[9]
H.-C. L. Hanebeck and B. Tracey, "The role of location in supply chain management: how mobile communication enables supply chain best practice and allows companies to move to the next level," Int. J. Mob. Commun., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 148--166, 2003.
[10]
J. Lovell, "Left-Hand-Turn Elimination," The New York Times, 09-Dec-2007.
[11]
D. Patier and J.-L. Routhier, "How to improve the capture of urban goods movement data," Transp. Surv. Methods Keep. Chang. World Emerald Bingley, pp. 251--287, 2009.
[12]
A. Hiramatsu, Y. Hara, M. Sekiyama, R. Honda, and C. Chiemchaisri, "Municipal solid waste flow and waste generation characteristics in an urban-rural fringe area in Thailand," Waste Manag. Res., 2009.
[13]
I. A. Junglas and R. T. Watson, "Location-based services," Commun. ACM, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 65--69, 2008.
[14]
K. Michael, A. McNamee, and M. Michael, "The emerging ethics of humancentric GPS tracking and monitoring," in Mobile Business, 2006. ICMB'06. International Conference on, 2006, pp. 34--34.
[15]
N. F. Ramos, A. B. Castilhos Jr, F. A. Forcellini, and O. D. Graciolli, "Profile Survey of Waste Pickers in Brazil: Requirements for the Development of a Collection Vehicle and Optimized Routing," J. Urban Environ. Eng. JUEE, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013.
[16]
L. H. Xavier, D. Lee, D. Offenhuber, C. Ratti, A. Diniz, and R. Medeiros, "Environmental Information System for Waste Electrical Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Management: Case Study of Pernambuco (Brazil)," in Proceedings of the 28th EnviroInfo 2014 Conference, Oldenburg, Germany, 2014.
[17]
A. A. Namen, F. da Costa Brasil, J. J. G. Abrunhosa, G. G. S. Abrunhosa, R. M. Tarré, and F. J. G. Marques, "RFID technology for hazardous waste management and tracking," Waste Manag. Res., p. 0734242X14536463, 2014.
[18]
D. Offenhuber and D. Lee, "Putting the informal on the map: tools for participatory waste management," in Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Exploratory Papers, Workshop Descriptions, Industry Cases-Volume 2, 2012, pp. 13--16.
Index Terms
- Forager: designing location-aware applications for informal waste recyclers in Brazil
Recommendations
e-government and performing enterprises: case of Madagascar
ICEGOV '13: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceSince 2007, e-government has been one of the solutions put forward by the Malagasy government to cope with the bureaucratic dysfunctions of the public administration, in particular, the tax administration procedures. The decision of integrating IT ...
A Scandinavian challenge, a US response: methodological assumptions in Scandinavian and US prototyping approaches
SIGDOC '02: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentationIn the early 1980s, Scandinavian software designers who sought to make systems design more participatory and democratic turned to prototyping. The "Scandinavian challenge" of making computers more democratic inspired others who became interested in user-...
Designing an Online Civic Engagement Platform: Balancing "More" vs. "Better" Participation in Complex Public Policymaking
A new form of online citizen participation in government decisionmaking has arisen in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. "Civic Participation 2.0" attempts to use Web 2.0 information and communication technologies to enable wider ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
September 2015
1626 pages
ISBN:9781450335751
DOI:10.1145/2800835
- General Chairs:
- Kenji Mase,
- Marc Langheinrich,
- Daniel Gatica-Perez,
- Program Chairs:
- Hans Gellersen,
- Tanzeem Choudhury,
- Koji Yatani
Copyright © 2015 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
- Yahoo! Japan: Yahoo! Japan
- SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing
- FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.: FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
- Google Inc.
- ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
- Rakuten Institute of Technology: Rakuten Institute of Technology
- Microsoft: Microsoft
- Bell Labs: Bell Laboratories
- SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
- KDDI
- Panasonic: Panasonic Corporation
- NTT DoCoMo
- Telefónica: Telefónica
- ISTC-PC: Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 07 September 2015
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
UbiComp '15
UbiComp '15: The 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
September 7 - 11, 2015
Osaka, Japan
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 159Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)6
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in