Information at the point of decision
Rosenthal et al. (2021) show recycling improves when guidance is given in the moment. The game rehearses that exact moment — over and over — without any real-world cost.
TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING · BEHAVIOR-CHANGE GAME
Design Process → 01 Research → 02 Define → 03 Ideate → 04 Prototype → 05 Test → ↺ Iterate
Recycle Right, Cardinals! — a mini-game that teaches Ball State's blue-bin rules at the moment of decision.
A browser-based sorting game built as one node inside a larger transmedia recycling campaign for Ball State University. Designed for EMDD 640 — Transmedia Storytelling, with research grounded in the team's empathy work, audience study, and Freytag's Pyramid story arc for behavior change.
Role
Research, narrative architecture, UX design, build, and copywriting
Team
Recycling Team · EMDD 640
Built with
HTML · CSS · vanilla JS · live meters · scenario logic
Course
EMDD 640 · Transmedia Storytelling · Ball State University
▸ A note on method
Ball State has a strong sustainability foundation — geothermal heating, a long-running Council on the Environment, blue-lined bins in nearly every building. What it does not have is a campus that consistently uses the blue-lined bins correctly. Empathy research in EMDD 620 found that recyclable batches are routinely diverted to landfill because of contamination. Recycle Right, Cardinals! is the small, repeatable interaction inside our transmedia storyworld that addresses that exact moment: the half-second before a student decides where the bottle goes.
Step 01
Empathy · Research
What we found
Our team's historical-context research — drawing on Ball State Facilities and Planning, the Council on the Environment, Republic Services and the Muncie Sanitary District, confirmed that the infrastructure works. The communication around it does not. Coverage in Ball Bearings and the Ball State Daily News reported recurring contamination concerns, student confusion about what is and isn't accepted, and skepticism about whether anything actually gets processed (Liakas, 2025). Reddit threads echoed the same frustrations.
Behavior research told us why. Noh (2021), Cho (2019), and Yusoff et al. (2024) all show that recycling participation rises when students perceive behavioral control and clear guidance. Rosenthal et al. (2021) show that recycling improves dramatically when accurate information arrives at the point of decision — not on a website, not in orientation, but on the bin or in the moment of disposal. The literature on the value–action gap names the phenomenon directly: pro-environmental beliefs do not consistently translate into pro-environmental action without scaffolding.
That gave the game a single design target: be the scaffolding.
Step 02
Define
How do you make a one-second decision feel like a learning moment?
The team's transmedia plan uses Freytag's Pyramid as its arc (exposition, rising action, complication, climax, reversal, falling action, resolution, dénouement) moving students from "I don't know what's recyclable here" to "I know, and I'm part of the system that makes it work." Inside that arc, the game sits in the rising action and the climax: the place where abstract knowledge has to become a hand on a bin lid.
Step 03
Ideate
Stickers, signage, and the missing micro-interaction.
Our larger transmedia plan included a documentary, a gamified "Do You Know?" street-quiz series, a "Recycle Me" sticker campaign, and an explainer series titled Here's What You Can Toss in the Blue Bins. Each story targets a different psychographic — Maya the Lapsed Intender, Derek the Indifferent, Jordan the Documentary Watcher, Dr. Funke the Faculty Amplifier. The stickers and the signage answer the question at the shelf and at the bin. The documentary answers it at home.
What was still missing was a piece that could live anywhere a student already had their phone open — in a residence-hall lounge, on the bus, between classes — and that could rehearse the decision before the bin showed up. A practice mode, basically. That became Recycle Right, Cardinals!: a sorting mini-game that uses Ball State's actual accepted-and-rejected materials list, written in the same plain language as the sticker campaign.
Step 04
Prototype
Building the loop.
Built in plain HTML so it can be embedded anywhere — residence-hall touchscreens, the sustainability site, a QR code on the sticker campaign itself, or right here in my portfolio. No install, no account, no friction.
Play it now
One full round is about 3 to 5 minutes.
Sort each item into the blue bin or the trash. Watch the meters react. The cardinal will tell you why.
Prefer a bigger screen? open the game in a new tab .
↺ Iterate · why this works
A small interaction, doing the work the signage couldn't.
Closes the value–action gap
The students we're targeting already care. They just don't know what counts. The game collapses the distance between intention and informed action.
A node, not a campaign
The mini-game shares language, color, and tone with the sticker campaign, the explainer series, and the documentary — so each touchpoint reinforces the others.
Recycling at Ball State isn't failing because the bins aren't there. It is failing because the moment of decision is unsupported. Recycle Right, Cardinals! is the support — small, repeatable, embeddable, and built directly out of the team's research.
More work