“The Anil Agarwal Dialogues 2013: Excreta Does Matter” conference was a platform for innovators and pioneers in the fields of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) to showcase their work along with the new techniques and methodologies that hold the most promise for improved sanitation systems in India.

Organised by the Centre for Science and Environment, this, the second edition of the Anil Agarwal dialogues, was held in the India Habitat Centre. Presenters from both the public and private sector shared case studies from their work to address some of the most pressing concerns for Indian sanitation: What is the current status of India’s fresh water reserves? Where will our fresh water come from in the near and distant future? What is the state of India’s sewage system?

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Project Sammaan’s initial pilot phase in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack involves the construction of 100+ separate community and public sanitation facilities. Some of these facilities will replace existing, non-functional toilet blocks on the land these failed facilities currently occupy, whereas others will be built on new land allocated by the municipal corporations for use in the project.

Irrespective of this, every site requires vetting to ensure it complies not only with building codes but also within parameters set by the project itself. In order to arrive at the final list of sites, nearly twice as many proposed areas as will be built on needed to be documented and evaluated.

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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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Apart from the varied insights around user behavior that the Potty Project research afforded us, we have learned that sewage and water service provisioning are also key factors ensuring the prolonged operation of facilities.

We decided early on that our designs needed to use a ‘septic tank’. This stemmed from the challenges affecting cities similar to our pilot locations in regards to sewerage access: Bhubaneswar has only a limited system while Cuttack lacks one altogether. The common practice in these instances is to couple an independent waste storage tank with a supporting bore well, for water requirements.

We observed a number of reasons for toilet facility failure due to sewage issues:

1. Lack of adequate capacity planning: In many toilets requiring on-site storage and evacuation, capacities weren’t planned appropriately. Inadequate frequency of vacuum truck evacuation caused systems to break down as the tanks flooded with excess waste water.

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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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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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Engaging communities is, in my opinion, by far the most fun and challenging part of the projects we do at Quicksand. Due to this, we were both nervous and excited about returning to the field after creating a guide and toolkit to elicit and record community responses during feedback sessions.

Ensuring Diversity & Representation

The first step was screening participants. Our on-field partners, CFAR, accomplished this by screening potential participants that fell into one of several profiles we defined. These profiles ranged from recently married couples with newborn infants to elderly or disabled individuals who might use a crutch, staff, or wheelchair.

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Notes and sketches after the initial brainstorm for our very own “Potty Lab”

We are setting up a toilet prototyping environment, playfully called the ‘Potty Lab’ in our Gurgaon studio.

This will enable us to test out ergonomics and other user-experience drivers for toilet & bathroom stalls within the sanitation facilities being designed by Project Sammaan. The results from the Potty Lab user-experience (UX) tests will inform architectural, product and component design, and detailing within different spaces in the new sanitation facility.

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It’s the 15th of February

We have jumped head-on into Project Sammaan. The task at hand – translating insights, anecdotes and important information from Potty Project and conveying it to the Project Sammaan architectural and space design team. A string of open brainstorms led to an excel sheet loaded with hundreds of ideas.We learned that re-inventing the wheel was not a possibility; the magnitude of the constraints became abundantly clear. This is going to be both daunting and exciting!

A month later. We have cracked the user journey for the proposed sanitation facility, made some bold decisions we feel really good about, and have begun playing around with the first round of layouts. Sketch Design Phase One is coming together!

Body-storming and role-playing to figure out basic ergonomics specifications for passages, booth sizes etc

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