The meeting with the Dragons gave me a different perspective on my project. Firstly they mentioned that I should not be making changes after people have done these behaviours as my first intervention was similar to testing people’s reactions to litter thrown by others when someone has thrown it. And these people I tested, they didn’t do that and they didn’t have to be responsible for what other people did. So that was one of the things that caused my first intervention to fail. I should have thought more about how to change people’s perceptions, for example by making them realise that littering in the park is a bad behaviour. Another dragon then suggested, so am I trying to create a rule to discipline people not to litter and to fine them if they litter. I don’t think that’s something I want to do either. So I want to balance these things. One dragon gave me a great tip about how in Paris, France, people would set up different teams in the area where they threw their cigarette butts when there was a team playing. Whichever team you support, you can throw your smoked cigarette butts in the bin marked with that one. I think it’s interesting that it’s designed to be a fun little activity so that people are unaware of it, protecting the environment and making it fun. I wish my intervention was like that.
After the first intervention, I found that a change in strategy was needed. Firstly littering should not be improved by other picking it up, but by developing the habit of not littering. So for the second intervention, I chose to redesign a bin and put a basketball frame above it with a poster (Make a clean shot into the bin with your rubbish! Three free passes and if you fail, please pick it up and put it in the bin anyways）.（This copy was revised for me by my classmates.）
The experiment lasted 3 hours and only about 5 portions of rubbish ended up in my bin. I observed that most people would stop to read my posters and then throw the rubbish into the large bin next to them. Probably because when designing this intervention, I was thinking about how I could make throwing rubbish into the side of the bin fun and innovative while making this simple action complicated. So during this experiment people may have been worried that it would be embarrassing or take some time if they didn’t get it in.
The benefits of green spaces and nature on mental health
As countries become increasingly urbanised, the world’s population is spending increasingly less time exposed to natural environments (Cox et al, 2018). It has been reported that 55% of the world’s population live in urban areas and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050 (United Nations, 2018). Unfortunately, urbanisation not only means spending less time in natural environments but more time destroying them and reducing the number of green spaces around the globe (Collins, 2014). Aside from the detrimental environmental effects of this, loss of these green spaces and time spent in them could have hugely negative effects on people’s mental health and well-being.
There is growing evidence to suggest that being in nature has positive effects on people’s mental health. Studies have shown that green spaces can lower levels of stress (Wells et al, 2003) and reduce rates of depression and anxiety, reduce cortisol levels (Park et al, 2010) and improve general well-being. Not only can a simple walk in nature boost your mood but also improve your cognitive function and memory (Berman et al, 2012). Green spaces can provide a buffer against the negative health impacts of stressful life events. A Dutch study showed that residents with a higher area of green spaces within a 3km radius had a better relationship with stressful life events (Van den Berg et al, 2010) which was soon to be increasingly important in recent years with the effects of COVID-19.