Waste Picker

Apple holds an annual coding and design competition for students during WWDC, where you build an app of your own in 3 weeks.

The game takes the player through several mini-games with a colorful, Brazilian and bold look, so that by the end they know the basics of recycling in our country.

To stand out among the submissions, I chose one of the missions and values defined by Apple that also spoke to my own interests: recycling.

For one week I ran desk research and an interview. It shaped how to approach the topic: beyond recycling, it is about an important and undervalued part of Brazilian society. Waste pickers are responsible for 90% of the recycled waste in Brazil.

I looked at a waste picker's daily life through videos, conversations and records with waste pickers in Curitiba, in the Vilinha area near PUC, and studied how the four main materials behave to make that knowledge accessible through a game.

I wanted to show our Brazil and the value of the recycling done by waste pickers. I walked around Curitiba photographing everything: the waste pickers passing by the university and even the trash on the sidewalk.

Going out and looking for inspiration in reality widened the graphic idea and let me play more with colors and shapes.

Before coding and editing images in Photoshop, I mapped the beginning of the story in a simple storyboard based on the photos I had taken. Those frames carried over a lot into the final game.

I processed every photograph to give it an artistic, edgy feel and set the game apart from other recycling games. I worked on the background first, then each object, layer by layer.

I also recorded the sounds of all the materials to deepen the player's sensory experience.

One of my biggest challenges was combining design and coding at the same time and finishing a working, bug-free program in under two weeks.

I kept the code simple, with drag and drop, taps and features that are quick to implement. I learned that doing something well finished is usually better than doing something complicated with many functions.

A web remake of the game, rebuilt from the original SwiftUI project with its real art. Tap the plastic, find the glass errors, unfold the box and fill the sack, the same way you would on the iPad.

After sending the app to the competition, I used an editorial class at university to take the creation from digital to physical: the book “Don't let this book become trash”. It took several adaptations to simulate touch and interactivity, which come naturally in an app, and keep that same dynamic interesting on the pages.

The best part of going from digital to physical was adding touch for the reader. In the app there was only visual and sound feedback; in the book, the reader can feel it too.

After the three weeks, I sent the game to Apple during WWDC week, and I was awarded in 2022.

Apple sent a card with the news: the project showed a commitment to coding and a dedicated effort to bring design to life.