Prototyping dilemmas

Testing a prototype with a family in Kumasi

One of the toughest things about prototyping in the field is having to explain to people why you need to take the prototype away after they have tried it. Several families we met with said that now that we had gotten them thinking about having a toilet in their homes, and now that they had experienced it for a couple days, they really want one.

Unfortunately, because there is currently no service provision for emptying the waste from the small toilets, it’s also not right to leave the toilets with the families after we return to the U.S. They would have no safe place to dump the waste and it would likely contaminate the soil and water of their communities.

So, we’re a bit stuck. Fortunately, the pilot test will be moving forward within the next few months which will allow many families to have access to both the product and the service. Additionally, it’s really encouraging to see such a high level of interest in the concept from the families who experienced the toilets, which makes us optimistic about this program moving forward and scaling quickly.

- Jocelyn (@jocelynw)

New Opportunities for Urban Sanitation

We’ve come to the end of the first phase of the Ghanasan project and are thrilled to share our deliverable which includes both research findings and opportunity areas from the IDEO team as well as concepts that inspired us from the OpenIDEO challenge.

Please share your comments or questions with us. We look forward to your feedback as we begin the next phase of this project with Unilever and WSUP next week. We’ll keep up the blogging and Tweeting as we continue to prototype and learn.

Thank you all for your fantastic contributions to OpenIDEO! This work is so much stronger because of all that you have done to support it.