The mission of San Francisco-based startup Rubbish is to rid the world of litter. They created the Rubbish Beam, a primitive version of a smart litter picker-upper, which can pair with a smartphone over Bluetooth. The idea was to register and categorize photos of litter, collecting data that would hopefully lead to greater insights about how to prevent litter.

To improve upon their existing design, Rubbish worked with industrial design consultancy Hatch Duo.

Clean-up in style.

Through brand-focused design and engineering, we went through the process of redesigning Rubbish's current beam to prepare it for scaling the brand. We emphasized Rubbish's fun and playful nature and encourage others to clean up their communities.

However, it's important to note that we worked on this entire project remotely, during the Covid-19 Pandemic. You can see in this case study how we not only used digital tools and remote tools to design, we virtually collaborated to maintain everyone's safety.

In the spirit of Rubbish's social platform, Hatch Duo collaborated openly and socially, documenting the whole process via our Hatch 22 docuseries. We invested time, love, and some design capital to get Rubbish to a functional/cosmetic prototype stage, as they enter their next funding milestones.?

Role: Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Cosmetic Prototype, and full documentary series. (Note: HD is invested in Rubbish)

?Behind the scenes of remote work at Hatch Duo.

Understanding the needs of the Client.

The Hatch Duo team studied the Rubbish app to get a sense of its brand identity, and created stylescapes that represent the brand.

Remote, yet hands-on product development.

Mockups are made and tested at the office and at home. The results are then shared with the team so problems can be identified and resolved.

That's it!

The Hatch Duo team would like to thank you all for joining us along on the journey! Designing a hardware product during a global pandemic had many challenges, but seeing all of the hard work from our team and the Rubbish team, makes us feel grateful and proud of the final product. Thank you again to the Rubbish team for giving us the opportunity and allowing us to document this process. It has been a fun journey, and the best part is, we're just getting started.

You can see more of Hatch Duo's work here.