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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Sammaan is the Hindi, Bengali and Odiya term for honor, respect, and dignity. We at Quicksand felt it the perfect name for the sanitation project we are undertaking that seeks to rethink the current model of sanitation facilities in urban slums and design a new structure that instills a sense of pride, dignity and respect.

The project will begin in slum communities in two cities in Eastern India – Bhubaneswar and Cuttack – and hopefully expand across the rest of the country.

Project Sammaan was born out of the research Quicksand undertook as part of the Potty Project, an in-depth design research study focused on understanding three things:

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