mr picky

Mr Picky is a fully functional robot designed to judge whether users are recycling correctly. It rolls its eyes, raises its eyebrows, and delivers disapproving looks when you get it wrong, and approving ones when you get it right. The concept grew from a simple observation that many people unknowingly contaminate recycling bins, soft plastics being a particularly common miss. Rather than addressing this through guilt, Mr Picky uses Arduino, a webcam, and Wekinator to classify recycling behaviour in real time, showing how humour, design, and technology can intersect to tackle a pressing environmental issue and actually make it stick. Built with Juwon Jung and Xiangnan Wu.