Excel Sheets, Architectural Layouts, Board Games & Beyond

It’s the 15th of February

We have jumped head-on into Project Sammaan. The task at hand – translating insights, anecdotes and important information from Potty Project and conveying it to the Project Sammaan architectural and space design team. A string of open brainstorms led to an excel sheet loaded with hundreds of ideas.We learned that re-inventing the wheel was not a possibility; the magnitude of the constraints became abundantly clear. This is going to be both daunting and exciting!

A month later. We have cracked the user journey for the proposed sanitation facility, made some bold decisions we feel really good about, and have begun playing around with the first round of layouts. Sketch Design Phase One is coming together!

It’s the 15th of April

We have spent a month rigorously tweaking architectural layouts and floor plans. It’s time to put the first set of iterations to the test, which is no simple task and one that raises many questions:

• How do we get the community to react to our architectural layouts?
• How do we validate the user journey we have proposed?
• How do we get a better sense of the aesthetics they prefer?

These questions and more led us to develop a community feedback toolkit to solicit user input on the proposed design as well as provide inspiring cues for the project’s next phase.

It’s the 1st of April

We have consensus on the ideal user journey and an architectural layout to match. The team chalked a a list of points to have a participatory discussion with slum community members in Orissa.

• Validate the user journey proposed in the new architectural layout
• Get references on architectural cues and materials that they like
• Delve deeper into sensitive issues such as menstrual hygiene, hand washing, access for people with physical disabilities, etc to help us detail the next round of facility designs.
• Collect inspiring user stories and anecdotes to help write a branding and communication brief for the toilet

After days of planning, going back to the drawing board, and re-planning, we came up with two simple rules for the toolkit:

1. Keep it Short, Keep it Simple, but Keep it Rich

Using visual aids to trigger participants to share compelling stories and anecdotes inspires richer design than simply asking a checklist of questions.

A life map was created to record all the places the respondent had lived and compare the sanitation services they accessed. Their answers create a quick yet rich story about them to understand their motivations and perceptions around lifestyle, sanitation and health.

We created a glossary of images on different architectural styles and elements and asked them to pick images they thought were interesting in order to gauge their aesthetic aspirations.We further asked them to tell us where in their surroundings they would see it being used and why.

While probing topics that might make a user feel uncomfortable, using stories about ʻother peopleʼ and narrating them in a euphemistic or humorous manner always sets the mood right. We created a storyboard scenario to probe what people use during their periods. It shows a fictitious girl, Roma getting her period for the first time and her mother teaching her how to use a cloth. Through real life characters, women were able to relate and tell stories about how they were educated about menstrual hygiene.

2. Create Tools that Engage the User

Having organized a few co-design sessions with similar audiences on prior projects, we realized that one of the trickiest things to achieve is holding the participant’s attention. Inducing a sense of play by creating tools that encourage interaction and making it easier for participants to communicate their thoughts becomes very important.

While there are a lot of design methods and tools out there, it was extremely challenging for us to to tweak them to get feedback on architectural layouts. We thought creating a board game where the participant actually goes through the same process as us, to come up with a sanitation facility layout that mirrors their existing routines, would be a great way to overcome these challenges. By giving them constraints of space, finances and role-playing journeys from their house to the facility, we could actually get a sense of how they would navigate these trade-offs.

We hypothesized that once the participants understood the game by creating their own layouts, we would show them our designed layouts to get more critical feedback on queuing, usage, multi-tasking within the facility.

The activity itself was well-received by the participants, it turned out to be a great way for us to have valuable discussions around privacy, issues around multitasking and perceptions of space.