A cleaner city with robots
Mar 2022 - ongoing
The city of Amsterdam, and especially the city centre, is heavily used by its citizens and visiting tourists. These users of the public space produce a lot of trash. This causes that the city is not as clean as prescribed by the city’s policies and the wishes of its citizens, despite the efforts of the Schoon department of the municipality which is tasked with keeping the city clean.
In order to increase the ability of the Schoon department to keep the city clean, the municipality is interested in deploying robots for cleaning tasks in the public space.
During this research I will provide the municipality of Amsterdam with the wishes and needs of the city’s Schoon department concerning the introduction of a cleaning robot for the public space.
These needs and wishes follow from observations and a series of interviews with managers and cleaners from the Schoon department. These interviewees will in the end be the human colleagues of such robots and have to use them.
Using the outcomes of the observations and interviews, loFi prototyping will take place. I will conduct certain processes during activities executed by the Schoon department that in the future a cleaning robot can conduct. These loFi prototyping moments will provide useful input from the cleaners and managers themselves and will be used to further improve the list of wishes and needs.
After a series of loFi prototypes, a hiFi prototype will be build. This hiFi prototype is a more concrete example of how the robot can look like and how it can behave. This hiFi prototype will also be used to let the cleaners and their managers reflect on their input from the interviews.
The final product of this research will be a set of design criteria based on the wishes and needs of the Schoon department employees which are validated and reflected upon by the end-users themselves.