Meeting with experts, conducting “Potty Lab” exercises, and general field research led to key insights and corresponding decisions across several facility components:

WC
One of our major learnings was, though a lower-height western-style WC might be an ideal choice in terms of comfort, there was a fair bit of resistance as it differed from their preferred habit of squatting.

The reasons weren’t hygiene-related as we had previously believed, but about ingrained behavior and the belief that squatting would help with bowel movements.

From a design perspective, this left us with an interesting dilemma: how could we provide support through a western-style WC and keep it high enough for wheelchair users to side-transfer to while also allowing other users to squat? After some discussions within the team, we realized that the best solution was a ‘low height hybrid WC’.

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Users living with physical disabilities, arising from disease (such as polio), accidents, and simply old age, get the shortest end of the stick in urban slum sanitation.

We met disabled users in many slums while conducting our research and realized that designing for this small group is essential. Otherwise the project would fail to live up to its name and its associated goal of providing dignity to all through better sanitation access.

We started allocating space for a universal access stall early on, but only had a very vague idea of what the actual design would be until we worked towards our first design milestone, ‘Sketch Design 1‘. An important caveat to point out is that we focused solely on designing for mobility impairments.

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With the architectural design stream moving along nicely, it was time to initiate the Brand Design workstream. While Project Sammaan is the internal name for the project, the sanitation facilities we design and build will carry their own brand identity.

It’s important to brand these sanitation facilities appropriately to ensure:

1. Optimal adoption amongst end users
2. A feeling of professionalism in the people who run these toilet facilities
3. Brand recall amongst stakeholders in the government (and other organizations working in this sector) to maximize future replication of our designs in other Indian cities.

We are very happy to announce the results for the Open Innovation Challenge!

Amongst the entries received for the Architectural Design Challenge, there is one that stands out for its extremely sound contextual understanding and the effectiveness with which it translated insights into design directions.

The entry was submitted by RMA Architects and the Project Sammaan team was unanimous in selecting it as the winner. Besides responding to the brief extremely well, the entry provided new directions which could be incorporated in the architectural design’s next iteration.

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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!

Body-storming and role-playing to figure out basic ergonomics specifications for passages, booth sizes etc

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Weʼve come a long way in the design phase of Project Sammaan! We started out by identifying innovation opportunities and then crafted a list of aspirations to design for. These included basic objectives such as reducing zones of filth and enforcing rules of use, but also factored in larger goals like shifting the user’s perception of the facility to something positive.This led to two weeks of comprehensive brainstorming sessions with experts from Biome Environmental Solutions, Sushant School of Art & Architecture, and our partners Studio Miscellanea and Anagram Architects.

Brainstorming session in our Gurgaon office.

These sessions at our Gurgaon studio generated over 170 ideas for features within the facilities. Each of these was then detailed and rated on various parameters, with the focus always remaining user-centered.This master list of features and principles will serve as the home base for spinning off briefs all design work streams (architectural, product/component, branding/communication, etc).

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