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Berky the Worm: How We Turned Berkeley’s Composting Crisis into a Community Playground

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Berky the Worm is a service design initiative aimed at making composting a fun, habitual part of life for the Berkeley community. By blending physical play structures with a digital reward system, we transformed a "gross" chore into an art-integrated social experience. My role as UI lead was to contribute heavily to initial idea generation and ideation, as well as design the high fidelity app design.

Role: Product Designer, UI Designer
Team: Elisa, Precious, Skye & Tiffany @MDes
Timeline: 4 Weeks, Fall 2025
Skills: Product Design, XFN Research, UI Design

Berky the Worm is an intelligent, art-integrated community hub designed to make composting engaging and accessible for Berkeley residents. Placed within existing community gardens, Berky doubles as a public play structure, workout space, and organic waste drop-off — all while educating the community about the composting process.

Composting isn’t failing because people don’t care about sustainability. It’s failing because the current experience doesn’t work for them.

Berkeley generates tons of organic waste daily, yet residents consistently fail to compost. Our initial research consisted of 8 interviews with 6 residents and 2 experts.

The Problem

Trash to Treasure: Making Composting Feel Less Like a Chore and More Like a Community Experience

Understand why composting is inconvenient or unsustainable for urban residents and identify opportunities to make it easier, cleaner, and more habitual

Berkeley residents

Community organizers

Business owners

Interview Goal

Target Interviewees

Pain Points

From our research, we mapped out three core reasons why people stop composting before they start.

The "Gross" Factor: Indoor bins are perceived as unhygienic, attracting pests and bad smells.

The Effort Gap: Manual waste sorting is viewed as a tedious process requiring more effort than standard recycling.

The Knowledge Void: Residents often don't know where their waste goes or how to manage it if their building doesn't participate.

If composting systems are redesigned to be more intuitive, accessible, and personally rewarding, users will be more likely to adopt and sustain composting behaviors, reducing organic waste sent to landfills.

The Hypothesis

“Maybe it would motivate me if I knew more of the impact I was making by composting, or if it could be more fun/less gross somehow.”

Initial Drafts

After early prototyping the team doubled down on a community compost worm concept for its ability to merge infrastructure, education, play, and community identity into a single object.

Idea 1: Compost Vending Machine/Locker

Idea 2: Community Compost Worm

Idea 3: Community Cargo Monster

The team explored three initial directions:

Compost Vending Machine — a locker-style drop-off with goal tracking and rewards

Community Compost Worm — a large sculptural worm functioning as a composting hub

Community Cargo Monster — a mobile compost collector with a community display

To empower Berkeley toward food self-reliance by creating an intelligent, art-integrated community space that makes composting education and practice engaging and accessible.

We began with a north star mission statement:

The Solution

Short term impact:
A unique community space, a playground, a workout area, and a bin for organic matter

Long term:

Access to compost, revitalizations of soils depended on for local food productions, education on food systems, and increased community food accessibility.

How Berky Works

Users "feed the worm" their compost.
Uses the Berkeley composting method to cut composting time in half.
Integrated bicycles help turn the compost sustainably.
Educational window shows the compost transformation process.

An intelligent, art-integrated community hub with both physical and digital counterparts.

Designed to empower Berkeley toward food self-reliance.

Our Final Solution: Berky the Worm

Rock climbing holds and other playground items to encourage kids to play around Berky.

A clear window so passebys can see the composting process firsthand.

QR Code to enable easy access to Berky the App.

Bikes that allow people to exercise as well as speed up the composting process!

Key Moments

Community Engagement

Doubles as a play structure for kids and a hangout spot for adults.

Paired with a digital app for offsite and onsite engagement.

App allows tracking, monitoring, and earning rewards.

Encourages community involvement and education.

Accessed through the QR code on both ends of Berky’s sculpture.

Built for Play - part art, part playground.

Berky functions as a playground for kids, a hangout for adults, and a composting drop-off. However, the play is not just “fun” - it provides access to finished compost, revitalizes local soils, educates the community on food systems, and increases food accessibility.

Berky is paired with a companion app that extends engagement beyond the physical site. Users can track Berky's health status, see what organic material is needed, monitor the composting progress, and earn rewards redeemable at local grocery stores. Push notifications prompt users when Berky is hungry.

We also chose a playful, modern aesthetic for the app, designing Berky’s digital counterpart as a cute illustrated worm to inspire personal attachment and connection to our users even beyond the playground.

Gamify Gamify Gamify:
A Digital Care Companion.

Play versus Practicality

The core tension I kept running into was play versus practicality. I really wanted to design something “playful” and fun, but that was challenging due to the nature of composting and also the assignment requirement of using technology.

The whole premise of Berky was to make it feel fun and social, but there's a version of that thinking that becomes superficial fast.

As a team, we had to really ask ourselves whether the playfulness was actually doing something (changing behavior, lowering friction, creating a reason to come back) whether it was just aesthetic justification for a concept we already liked. However, with studio critique and user research, we were confident in our final product being both delightful and purposeful.

Learning to hold the tension between delight and utility is probably the most useful thing I took out of this project as a designer.

Reflection