Paper Toilets & Cardboard Bathrooms

This month, we started working on detailing the bathing stall, toilet booth and disabled access booth designs after completing our community feedback sessions in Bhubaneshwar.

We crafted a long list of activities and design aspects requiring user feedback at the end of Sketch Design 1. These user-centric insights are absolutely vital in ensuring that the designs are a response to what end-users need and not just “more of the same”.

Design phases that involve participatory feedback tend to involve long, laborious sessions as our approach is exhaustive; we try to test everything. In an effort to offset this, and to distill the list we usually start with, we made certain assumptions based on our understanding of the user’s behaviors and perceptions. These design considerations would then be validated (or disproved) through Potty Lab observations.

‘Putting-yourself-in-the-user’s-shoes’ is a phrase that is often used in the design process. That is easier said than done. This is especially so when the users have different sensibilities or even physical capabilities. (The last point is particularly poignant as we design the disabled-access stall.)

Using tools to visualize scenarios can help identify design gaps very early on. They also provide much needed inspiration when you are “stuck” ideating on CAD layouts.

As a child, I would often make little enclosures with pillows and sheets in my bedroom. The possibilities of what that little cubbyhole could be were endless. With the right accessories (and imagination) it could be anything, from an airplane cockpit to a cave with monsters and treasures.

I find that the process of rough prototyping alongside ideation is somewhat similar as it enables one to add dimensionality to ideas while engaging minimal effort and resources.

Armed with floor layouts, 2d prints of toilets and basins, moveable cardboard walls, and sanitation accessories from the local market, we built low fidelity mock-ups that would help us test concepts quickly and cheaply.

To test the different booth layouts we’d developed prior to inviting in volunteers, we re-enacted user journeys amongst ourselves. These journeys stemmed from field research observations and validated some ergonomic details. They were also useful in tweaking designs within the actual space.

This activity allowed us to arrive at an optimal design for the toilet and bath stalls and helped condense the list of questions we needed user validation on.

Very soon, we will be inviting users from the community to test out experience prototypes we’ve developed in the coming weeks.