Improved sanitation for Bhubaneswar & Cuttack
After a lull in the identity design development workstream over the last two months, December saw significant progress made on the identity. Codesign shared an updated branding presentation, which incorporated feedback received from previous discussions, as well as improvements and explorations that had been developed internally.
Identity Design
The focus of the current iteration of the identity development exercise is to create an identity that strikes an (more…)
The last edition of the Project Sammaan newsletter saw Codesign finalising and sharing the BoQs for all 14 typologies of the community toilets. That task, once complete allowed us to focus on the more pressing communications challenges, namely the character designs for the facilities’ signage and the main Project Sammaan identity itself.
The primary focus of Anagram’s work on Sammaan right now involves detailing out the working drawings for each of the facilities. As one can imagine, providing the granular details for each of the 119 facilities being built is quite an undertaking. This is especially so considering that each drawing requires the inputs of several project partners.
A lot of our time is dedicated to interfacing with these partners to ensure that their questions are answered in a timely manner and any necessary changes are incorporated as quickly as possible. Anagram is working closely with CDD on the designs of the sewerage systems, with Codesign to detail out spaces for signage, and with Arkitechno to review and evaluate each drawing. Additionally, we’re reporting into Quicksand along the way to keep them abreast of developments and challenges we’re facing.
When we first launched this blog, we provided weekly recaps of project-related activities in a series of posts called “Week That Was”. The thinking behind this type of reportage was two-fold: to provide a running, real-time catalogue of events as they happen and to be as transparent as possible in sharing our work as it unfolds.
We shifted away from this type of writing in the interest of sharing more thoughtful, reflective pieces about learnings from the project and individual partner experiences with it. However, given the call for greater communication from all of the partners, we’re reinstating these updates. The hope is that it will augment the experience for visitor’s to this site such that all audiences, from casual observers to invested project stakeholders, will glean deeper and richer knowledge about the Sammaan initiative.
In the past few weeks and months, most of the work that has happened on Project Sammaan has involved intense collaboration between various partners in order to fulfill various deliverables for tendering the community toilets in both Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. The very nature of the hardware workstream currently involves sequential and simultaneous inputs from various partners, including Anagram Architects, the Consortium for DEWATS Dissemination (CDD), Codesign, and Arkitechno.
The usual sequence of work involves multiple steps:
It’s been an excel-sheet filled month for Codesign this August, as the finalised Bill of Quantities (BoQ)for 14 toilet typologies, including the three added this month (2-seater enhanced layer, 4-seater enhanced layer (type-A) and 8-seater enhanced layer) have been compiled and shared with Anagram Architects to facilitate the tender process.
Generating this BoQ required us to map the various signages onto the spaces within each facility, with attention paid to the hierarchical value of each signage and the relevance of it’s message to that particular location.
As keen readers of the Project Sammaan blog and people deeply invested in the project, you already know that the signage tender for 4 community toilet typologies has just been sent out. As we work on refining the designs for the signs themselves, and creating the specifications for the remaining typologies, this seemed like a great spot to take a step back and reveal the signage program for the Project Sammaan toilet facilities.
There are four different categories of signs in the Project Sammaan facilities:
Early on in the project, there had already been an effort to create an identity and voice for Project Sammaan, with the aim to bring together the different streams of work and thought, while giving a unified face to the project as a whole.
There are two distinct components within the framework of the larger project — one that is internal facing, representative of a collaborative consortium of stakeholders rethinking sanitation systems (i.e. Sammaan), and the second, a user-facing, sanitation system prototype borne out of the collaborative effort of Project Sammaan. The question that loomed large at the beginning of the branding stream was whether there was a need for a second brand for the user-facing sanitation system prototype. To understand this, we examined key features for both across categories of target user group, objectives, drivers/motivators and the intended role of brand identity.
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.