Kaelos is a cooperative project developed by three people, Maximiliano Ojeda, Gabriel Guevara and Fernanada Peralta.

We identified a problem that had become of high relevance in the global scene, the effects of climate change and the excess of plastic residues in the planet kept rising year with year, so we set our minds to find a solution at a local scale through the methodology of design thinking, the first thing we did was to sketch out the problem using the inductive method, we started to outline which were the greatest problems the everyday people had with recycling through interviews and polls, form the information we gathered we discovered that there were three factors that played a major role in people lack of interest in recycling, the first one was ignorance; the people did not know how to separate the residues, nor did they know what to do with them once they had done the task. the second one was lack of motivation, people did not find a reason to recycle, they considered that the actions that they did not really have any impact nor that they were actually going to receive any kind of benefit for doing this task and the third factor was the time, people did not want to invest time in taking the separated residues to far from they’re everyday routine, they weren't willing to alter there everyday life.

After the delimitation of the problems and finding the root cause of the lack of recycling we met with the experts in the field, we learned that the recycling problem was more complex that people usually think and that one of the biggest barriers we faced was the disposal of the material, our study case was centered in Puebla City, and in this specific case there was a problem with the disposal centers, they were just for industrial scale disposal and were not willing to take the small amount that an average person produces, so we had to find a way to solve this problem, the solution was to create Kaelos ambassadors, these ambassadors would be active members of the platform that would be interested in becoming social leaders and be the face of Kaelos, we found another key player in the recycling cycle, and this key player needed help, usually in México there are people who go house to house picking up garbage as a method of living and these people could become one of our greatest key players so we tried to find a way to integrate them to the model by integrating them to Kaelos, they already tried to separate the aluminium cans and carton as away of living and with Kaelos we could help them to rise the volume of what they could gather and help them get more money for their work; beside they would get the highest amount of benefits from the platform as they would gather a lot of points by their labor.

Once we had all the key factors and the challenges we had to solve we started to sketch the best way to solve each of the three problems we found, ignorance, lack of motivation and time. We solved the ignorance problem by creating a library of materials inside the Kaelos platform in which the user could learn in an easy way how to separate each residue and understand the effects that recycling it would have by giving him information about the benefits that recycling would bring (like how with the energy saved from recycling one can of aluminium could light a lightbulb for more than 7 hours).

The lack of motivation was a big barrier so we decided to integrate the techniques of gamification in order to surpass this obstacle, people have a natural desire to socialize so we created an social profile in which the user could have his information displayed so other user could interact with each other, we included the need to feel mastery over the topic by introducing levels of expertise in the app so the user would gradually evolve and have more time to explore and develop inside the platform, this also would establish a sense of status inside the app that would motivate the users to crave for development, we also included the achievements so the user would be receive a reward for their hard work, the backbone of Kaelos would be the real life rewards, we introduced benefits you could purchase with the points you get from your labour, like deductions in government services and discount with our key associates. We planned on introducing a graphic representation of the benefit you generate with the volume your recycling.

Now boarding the second aspect of the platform, what will happen with all the money we get from recycling? to solve this situation we introduced circular design, when we received money we would invest it in the improvement of green areas and the renovation of public spaces, this way we would generate visible improvements in order to attract more users,this new users will allow us to generate even bigger benefits to society and make the wheel of improvement keep going.