While there has been a considerable amount of activity in the past few months on the tendering front for the toilet facilities in Bhubaneswar & Cuttack, we have also simultaneously started working on the toolkit. The toolkit is an essential part of Project Sammaan, aiming to put together guidelines for effective sanitation interventions in low-income urban contexts, based on our own experiences and learnings from Project Sammaan.

Through the detailed design exercises and fine-tuning our understanding of what works and what doesn’t work, an essential outcome of the project will be the toolkit, that will include a set of “blueprints” for future infrastructure projects that will be (more…)

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.

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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:

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Project Sammaan has been going full-steam ahead for well over a year now. Several posts have been written over the last few months detailing the many challenges that have been faced thus far, so we thought it pertinent to review the achievements that the team is most proud of.

1. Facility design features were finalized.

After months of internal deliberations and community engagement exercises, the design features of the facilities were agreed upon, thereby allowing the individual facility designs to proceed. This is the first, most critical, component of the design process and one that seeks to shift the Potty Project findings from the conceptual phase and into practice.

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Project Sammaan aims to rethink urban sanitation services by applying holistic, systems-based thinking and principles informed by user-centered design insights from the field. These improvements are broadly categorized into four “Pillars of Innovation”:

• Business Models

• Operations & Maintenance models

• Architecture & Infrastructure Design

• Branding & Communications

The Branding & Communications stream, led by Codesign, aims to develop and deploy a system of improved messaging, including the branding of the facilities themselves, as well as the system of visuals (signage, use of color, etc.) throughout the Project Sammaan facilities.

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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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As part of the communications team, my field visit brief was to get an initial understanding of the environment for the sanitation facility as well as of the visual culture of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.

In my short, three-day visit, I covered two slums in Bhubaneswar and another in Cuttack. This was my first visit so it was also important to interact with the on-field teams working in Odisha as much as possible.

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