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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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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