While Project Sammaan is the project’s name, the sanitation facilities we design and build will carry their own brand identity.

It’s important to brand these sanitation facilities appropriately to ensure optimal adoption rates amongst end users in the communities, a feeling of professionalism in the people who run these facilities, and brand recall amongst stakeholders in the government and other organizations working in this sector to maximize its impact.

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Supplies needed to make our very own paper toilet!

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”.

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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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