Turning waste infrastructure into social infrastructure.
How do you turn the Baltics' largest landfill into a place people choose to visit, contribute to, and come back to? We started by asking why sustainable choices feel so hard, and designed around the answer.
A landfill with a 2029 deadline, and a public that wants to do better but rarely does.
Getliņi EKO is opening a new Environmental Education Center in 2029, and they wanted services that would make circular living feel worth doing, not just for people who already recycle and repair, but for everyone else too. We spent the project trying to understand that second group. The pattern that kept coming back was this: people don't reject sustainability, they reject friction. REBOOT is the physical and digital ecosystem we built around that finding. I led the research and authored the service blueprint that turned our concept into something Getliņi could actually run.
Client
Getliņi EKO, Riga
Year
2025 · Sept to Dec
My role
Service Designer · Lead Researcher · Facilitator
Team
Catherine Martin, Khairunnisa Intiar, Qamar El Ali, Vishvak Rajendran, Aisha Orynaly, Anabelle Kathleen Makmur
Deliverables
The largest landfill in the Baltics, racing toward an EU deadline.
700t
waste processed every day
1M+
residents served
~50%
of waste still landfilled today
10%
EU target by 2035
Getliņi already does a lot well. Biogas from its waste powers around 5,000 households and heats nine hockey-field-sized greenhouses growing the cucumbers and tomatoes it is known for nationally. The gap is on the public side. Latvia still sends about half its waste to landfill, and the EU wants that down to 10% by 2035.
The Education Center is Getliņi's bet on closing that gap by changing how people behave, not just what they're told. That framed our brief. We weren't designing a building to walk through once. We were designing reasons for people to take part again and again, so the Center earns a place in their everyday lives.
From our field visit to Getliņi EKO
How might we make repairing and exchanging things feel as easy and rewarding as buying new, for everyone, not just the already-converted?
There's an easy trap in a project like this. Sustainability spaces tend to attract people who already care, and it's tempting to design for them because they show up. But the people who could move the numbers are the ones who aren't there yet. They want to do the right thing and don't, because it's inconvenient, unclear, or invisible to everyone around them. Designing for that gap, between good intentions and actual behaviour, became the real work.
I treated this as a research problem first, and a design problem second.
Before sketching anything, I wanted to know what actually stops people. Over the autumn we listened to 120+ people across five methods, each chosen to answer a different question: interviews, a survey, ethnography, a field visit, and a co-creation workshop.
20
qualitative interviews
Riga residents and commuters. I ran several myself.
70
survey participants
bilingual, English and Latvian
11
co-creation workshop
residents and Getliņi staff. I co-led it.
From the co-creation workshop — “Repair & Reimagine Together”
Ethnography at Riga's Repair Café
What we heard, again and again
The same thing surfaced across interviews, the workshop, and the Repair Café. People wanted to act, but the path was confusing, far away, or something nobody around them was doing. The barrier was rarely how much they cared. It was how much effort it took. Two people put it more clearly than any chart could:
“Going to a shop five minutes from home to buy a new blender is more convenient than driving 40 minutes across the city to maybe fix it.”
“We don't know how to fix the things we care about, so they end up hidden in a box, waiting.”
The survey put numbers to the friction
86%
would skip an event if travel was inconvenient
68%
didn't know which items would be accepted
72%
lacked the skills and tools to repair
61%
keep items for sentimental reasons
People don't resist sustainability.
They resist friction.
Naming it that way changed what we were solving for. The goal was no longer to convince people to care, most of them already did. It was to close the gap between wanting to act and actually acting, and to make acting feel good enough to repeat. From there, three principles guided almost every decision we made.
Reduce friction
Make the sustainable choice the easiest one in the room, not the one that asks the most of people.
Make it social
Turn private effort into something shared and visible, so doing good feels good in front of others.
Bridge physical and digital
Let the space and the app carry each other, so neither has to do the whole job alone.
A hybrid ecosystem that gives objects a second life, and people a reason to come back.
REBOOT lives inside the Education Center and reaches into everyday life through an app. Four connected elements do the work, each one aimed at a barrier we found in research.
Storytelling
When someone gives an object, they record a memory or a care tip with it. The story travels with the item, on the shelf and in the app, so reuse feels personal instead of anonymous.
Object life & value
Each item gets a clear, visible score, so people can see it's worth keeping. It answers the quiet “is this even worth it?” that stops a lot of people before they start.
Community membership
Exchanging, repairing, and joining workshops earns points toward DIY toolkits, themed events, and member workshops. It's how a single visit turns into a habit.
Companion app
The app ties the rest together: tokens, stories, item pre-checks, and bookings, all linked back to the real space.
How it works — the exchange journey
The companion app
The app is built on Getliņi's existing digital presence rather than as a new product to maintain. Its job is to turn one visit into a relationship: it keeps track of a person's exchanges and impact, suggests what to do next, and answers the “will my item even be accepted?” question before anyone makes the trip.
Try the interactive prototypes
Impact dashboard
Shows waste prevented and materials saved in real terms, so impact feels personal rather than abstract.
DIY kits
Unlocked by membership tier: turn old textile into a tote, plastic into décor, a broken chair into a bench.
Item pre-check
Snap a photo before you travel and see if your item qualifies. This is the direct answer to the 68% who didn't know what was accepted.
Primary deliverable — I authored this
The full service blueprint: front-stage, back-stage, and the systems that hold the hub and app together.
I authored the full service blueprint, mapping every interaction across the exchange and repair journeys: what the visitor does, what staff do behind the counter, and the systems supporting both. It was the main document we handed to Getliņi EKO, and the piece that turned the concept into something they could actually operate.
We didn't stop at a concept. We built it and put it in front of people.
To find out whether the ideas held up, we ran a working prototype with 20 participants. We asked them to bring objects they no longer used, then walked them through a real exchange, a repair, and the app, watching where things clicked and where they hesitated.
Validated
People actually exchanged
One person swapped an umbrella for home décor, another traded sunglasses for string lights. The exchange worked without us prompting it, which told us the core mechanic was sound.
Validated
Storytelling was the part that stuck
People lingered over objects' stories and enjoyed writing their own. 80% said storytelling or community features would bring them back, so we leaned into it.
Changed by testing
So we restructured the space
We had drawn exchange and repair as separate zones. Watching people move between them, it was clearly one flow, so we merged the repair workshop into the exchange space.
That last change is the one I'm proudest of. The design moved because of what we saw, not what we assumed. Putting repair and exchange in the same space let them feed each other instead of competing for a visitor's attention, and it only became obvious once real people were in the room.
Don't wait for the building. Start the behaviour change now.
Here's the tension I kept coming back to: the Center opens in 2029, but we did this research in 2025, and habits take years to build. Waiting four years to start would mean opening the doors to strangers. So we proposed the opposite. REBOOT can begin in public, at small scale, right now. Each step builds a community, tests what works, and feeds what we learn back into the 2029 design, so opening day welcomes people who already know and trust it.
Pop-up story exchanges in public space
Start with exchange exhibitions in museums, libraries, and public squares, objects shown next to their stories. It introduces the storytelling idea where people already are, with no travel friction, and quietly builds familiarity with REBOOT.
City-wide exchange lockers
Partner with locker networks across cities and towns so people can drop off and pick up exchange items near home. This is the direct answer to the 86% who'd skip an inconvenient trip: bring the service to their routine instead of asking them to drive to a landfill.
Mobile repair workshop on the road
A travelling repair workshop tours neighbourhoods and events, teaching skills and making repair visible and social. Every stop grows the community and the volunteer base before the Center even opens.
Every pilot feeds the 2029 model
The exchanges, lockers, and workshops all generate real data: what people bring, what they take, which stories land, where friction stays. That evidence shapes the final Center, so 2029 is built on years of learning rather than guesses.
The Education Center opens to a ready community
By opening day, REBOOT has proven mechanics, established partners, and people who already take part. Launch feels like a reunion, not a cold start.
What I owned.
Lead researcher
I shaped the research plan and pulled the findings from interviews, ethnography, survey, and workshop into the single insight that the rest of the concept was built on.
Service blueprint
I authored the full blueprint, the front-stage and back-stage map that turned a good idea into a service the team could run.
Workshop facilitation
I co-led the co-creation workshop and ran the Three Whys and journey-mapping sessions, which surfaced the motivations people don't usually say out loud.
Partnership talks
After the Repair Café visit, I opened the conversation between Getliņi EKO and Repair Café Rīga, our closest real-world reference.
What I'd carry forward.
We ran the workshop with six rotating facilitators. It spread ownership across the team, but it also made the energy uneven and forced participants to re-settle each time someone new stepped in. Next time I'd push for one consistent lead with the others supporting, so the session reads as a single arc.
The hardest part, it turned out, wasn't facilitation. It was getting clear on the purpose and outcomes before we started. Once that was settled, the rest fell into place. The moment that mattered most was a reframe: moving from “people are lazy” to “people face friction.” That one shift did more for the project than any single feature, and it's why I now test how a problem is framed before reaching for solutions.
Sustainability doesn't fail because people don't care. It fails because caring is made hard. REBOOT makes it easy, and worth coming back for.