Illustrations and the Art of Toilet Facility Maintenance

Project Sammaan aims to rethink urban sanitation services by applying holistic, systems-based thinking and principles informed by user-centered design insights from the field. These improvements are broadly categorized into four “Pillars of Innovation”:

• Business Models

• Operations & Maintenance models

• Architecture & Infrastructure Design

• Branding & Communications

The Branding & Communications stream, led by Codesign, aims to develop and deploy a system of improved messaging, including the branding of the facilities themselves, as well as the system of visuals (signage, use of color, etc.) throughout the Project Sammaan facilities.

“Improved”, in this context, refers to communication that better enables the adoption of good sanitation and hygiene practices. It is heartening to see the massive, recent increase in projects from both public and private sector organizations seeking to provide better sanitation solutions to a dramatically underserved populace. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of these projects have failed to drive the adoption of better sanitation and hygiene practices.

We believe that a well-researched system of branding and communication, informed by user-centered design principles, can go a long way towards addressing this shortfall.

The exact methods of the research and the design systems in place that will inform the process have been covered in previous blog posts, and we will continue to update this blog with new developments and insights as they evolve.

For this post, however, I would like to focus on some of the more minute details that are often overlooked in a project of this nature.

The internal signage within the toilet facilities will depend primarily on illustrations and imagery to communicate way-finding and sundry information. This is a decision that was taken early on in the project as a way to mitigate the pitfalls inherent in planning a system of communication for an audience that speaks several different languages and differing levels of literacy.

We are developing a family of characters that will act as vehicles for the messaging as well as benchmarks along the journey to cleanliness and happiness (introduced as part of the primary brand messaging).

Meet Mr & Mrs. Saaf (clean) and their children:

This family will serve to deliver direct (eg. Male washing area or Children’s bathing area, etc.) and in-direct (always depicted as being happy, wearing clean clothes and exhibiting good hygiene behaviors) messaging throughout the Project Sammaan toilet facilities.

The illustrative style shown here will become the back-bone of the extended system of messaging, with similar styles being used to delineate gender segregated areas, draw attention to task specific facilities (clothes washing, hand & foot wash, and more) etc.

This style has been arrived at after an extended design process involving direct and secondary user research, a snapshot of which has been shared below.

The process of creating the perfect ‘Hand & Foot Washing Zone’ sign:

Step 1: Exploring composition and color to highlight the relevant areas of the messaging

 

Step 2: Adding details like bubbles and water flow to highlight key benefits of the planned toilet facility, such as availability of running water and the main brand attribute of cleanliness.

 

Step 3: Further exploration of the elements included in the images, their representations and the strokes and colors used.

Step 4: Refining details such as the style of the shadows, orientation of the thumbs. The hands were also re-drawn to enable simpler, ‘noise-free’ communication.

 

 

Final illustration: Final illustration contains gushing water, frothy soap, open hands and clearly visible feet. Volume/dimensionality added through a subtle layer of shadow.