The Zero Waste Narrative Research Project:

Future Meets Present set out to turn the co-working space it occupied into a Zero Waste workplace - New York City’s first. To do so meant sustained research around recycling, human behavior, habits and intentions, commercial waste systems, ‘user experience’ and much more. In order to help synthesize so much complexity, and deepen and broaden their research, ALI engaged in an accompanying narrative-literacy study to see if ‘telling the story’ of this project could also help the project.

We documented FMP’s process, filmed and analyzed interviews, cut together scenes and pieces of story and then re-viewed these scenes with the participants to gain a reflective, multisubjective view of the design process and the humans at work on it. FMP also got the benefit of media content and usable clips, scenes, and footage for its promotional and publicity purposes, while also gleaning valuable insights into their work.

So far the outcomes have been a 4-fold increase in the workspace’s diversion rate away from landfill, and an increased awareness about how to design for complex systems and build new infrastructures that can effectively achieve ambitious social and sustainability goals. FMP’s work, assisted by narrative-literacy research, is being phased to building-wide scales as a part of New York City’s zero waste mandates for 2030.