Additional disabled user testing needed to be conducted, so we began seeking out participants through various channels.

After failed attempts at recruiting users through various organizations, we decided to use the snowballing method of recruitment where you ask someone you know to connect you to someone they know and so on. We looked closer to home and reached out to our office staff. Our cook, Mr. Dayanand, offered to help us recruit people from his community in ‘Chiragh Dilli’, as well as at a nearby temple where a small community of disabled people beg for alms.

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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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Two children pose infront of their school in Sikharchandi.

Quicksand’s approach is about human-centered research and design and Project Sammaan encapsulates this.

An ancillary goal in this project is to engage and inform a larger community about sanitation in India specifically and life in the slums here generally.

For some of us at Quicksand, Sammaan represented the first opportunity to visit a slum community. We decided to share that experience by embedding Ryan and I (both Americans) in one of the slums we’re working with for 24-hours. The objective being to share what living without adequate sanitation would be like, if only for a short time.

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