Four Pillars of Innovation

Potty Project research led to insights around opportunities to improve sanitation service delivery and, consequently, end-user perceptions around sanitary practices. These learnings were cased in four “pillars of innovation”: Operations & Maintenance, Branding Communications, Architectural Infrastructure, and Business Models.

1. O&M

Community sanitation facilities are in an ever-deteriorating physical state with derelict toilet hardware, broken doors or tiles, and accumulating layers of filth seeming an inevitable end for most. Overcoming people’s perceptions around participation in cleaning and maintaining these toilets will be a key challenge.

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Recruiting for Research Sessions

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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Designing for Universal Access

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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Synthetic Feces, Tiger Worms & Toilets, Toilets, Toilets

The Project Sammaan team was one of several Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees invited to participate in their “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” this month at the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.

Bill Gates speaking at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair.

The fair was all things toilet: from new designs to the loo itself, to waste collection innovations and everything in between. It was amazing to see what individuals and organizations developed under the banner of “Reinventing the Toilet”: from using organisms for waste disposal and generating energy from feces, to communications interventions for shifting attitudes and preferences away from open-defecation.

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