Bite-Size Progress

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Check out my piece for the Industrial Design Society for America's Spring 2016 Women in Design Issue of INNOVATION Magazine here.

This past year has been a whirlwind as I transitioned from a student designer operating with fantastical budgets and production strategies to a social entrepreneur leading cross-sector design work for use in the developing world. Nevertheless, I have learned that with the constraints of reality also comes the opportunity for incredible creative problem solving.


With an amazing team, I design toilets for the developing world through my social startup Wish for WASH, LLC. As an industrial design student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in 2013, my interdisciplinary senior design team created the SafiChoo toilet, an inexpensive mobile toilet, which then won the 2014 Georgia Tech InVenture Prize Competition, or the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States. The winnings enabled my original team to pilot the first iteration of the SafiChoo toilet in the Kakuma Refugee camp with the CDC and Norwegian Refugee Council under the auspices of Sanivation. Following the pilot, I founded Wish for WASH, recruited a new team and worked to iterate the design based on feedback we received in the field. Now, the SafiChoo 2.0 modular toilet, manufactured as a production prototype in Atlanta and China, will be tested via a beta pilot in Lusaka, Zambia this year. The 2.0 solution is a sanitary option that is intended to be universally and easily deployed by the customer (such as international aide agencies) while simultaneously being culturally specific with a toolbox of options that enable the end user (such as marginalized people in low resource communities) to choose how to use the toilet to best meet their needs. Specifically, the modular components consist of: 

·       the sit-squat seat which allows sitting in a traditional manner or to use the squatting position which is a common cultural practice in many countries and is an anatomically healthier position for defecating,

·       the spacer which raises the toilet seat to a comfortable sitting height,

·       the underground waste collection unit which can be adapted to existing waste management solutions or used to treat the waste internally via urine diversion or compost.

The findings from our eminent 2016 pilot will determine our next design iterations and whether Wish for WASH has a minimum viable product to scale. As a team, we are passionate about bringing innovation to sanitation with the ideal goal of creating a solution that can be deployed in low-resource communities because there are 2.5 billion people in the world today who lack access to a safe, hygienic toilet.

 

After a year leading the Wish for WASH team and after a year of being out of college, I have learned that there are numerous areas beyond the physical product where I seek to thrive and utilize my creative problem solving skills in order to grow and create sustainable impact. Proving the physical design technically works as well as being a user friendly and intuitive option is only the first step in an entrepreneur’s journey. I constantly repurpose the design thinking cycle to iterate “go-to-market” strategies, manufacturing methodologies, distribution channels, meaningful ways to measure the intended verses the actual impact of our work and devising creative fundraising strategies such as our indegogo campaign which continues to fund the upcoming pilot. I have been forced to realize that twenty-four hours each day does not provide enough time to completely exhaust all ideation and implementation possibilities in this interdisciplinary social impact design field—which is a frustrating reality of adulthood.

 

While in school, I approached my design work in a vacuum without truly understanding the complexities of working with people from sectors such as  business, international development, finance and manufacturing, especially as it relates to gender.  As a female, I have learned that work in this space requires learning to balance patience with persistence in terms of fighting for progress in a professional and culturally appropriate way; many cultures are male dominant and resist female input and decision making. Nevertheless, an important aspect of sanitation work involves gender equity as evidenced by the huge number of pubescent girls in developing countries who frequently drop out of school or are sexually assaulted for defecating outside at night because their schools and homes lack toilets. These marginalized women are more inclined to share their stories with other women, as I witnessed by collecting a substantial amount of information from female heads of households during our Kenyan pilot with Sanivation. It is vital for women product designers to work in the social sector to help navigate historically gendered work in order to advocate for societal advancements of women via giving them a voice they might not otherwise have.

 

While I continue to navigate these new and often unclear terrains, the iterative process of the physical toilet has taken much more time than I could have ever anticipated. However, I have learned that where I am at that precise moment is better than where I was previously. I was inspired to “do something” about the global sanitation crisis during my freshmen year at Georgia Tech, and that conviction—despite how unusual—is what propels me to do the work that I do today. Helping to creatively end the global sanitation crisis is an incredibly monumental goal that requires more than just a great idea. This work also requires incredible resilience. To work toward my ultimate goal of all people living healthier lives as a result of having a safe and hygienic toilet instead of an overflowing hole in the ground, I have learned that bite-sized chunks of progress must be made. Most importantly, to avoid burn out, I have internalized Jonathan Kozol’s message to pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win.

 

As a 23 year old, I have created a social enterprise and have lead an incredible team of Georgia Tech students and recent graduates who are designers, engineers, business people, and researchers in developing two iterations of the SafiChoo toilet. Thus far, we have created an ever-changing business plan, assembled an inspiring Advisory Board, raised some startup capital, and completed our first manufactured production prototype run. We are not yet close to a sustainable business model or to scaling our design across the world, but our intentions are clear and our work is meaningful; the social sector needs more creatives to support the United Nation’s newly deemed Sustainable Development goals  to have innovative and human-centered solutions to solve the world’s grand challenges. A prominent movement towards social impact design work is growing in the Industrial Design community, and it is necessary for it to continue to grow because we are taught to view problems as opportunities. Industrial designers are also needed to further catalyze and expand the maker movement across the developing world by making open source technologies, such as 3D printing, available to inspire solutions to be created within resource constrained communities that better understand their own needs.

In the end, I am learning to control my frustrations with my lack of rapid progress toward my all-encompassing goal; thus, I am accepting that my work is inspiring humanity to take a few steps forward toward improved global sanitation. A few steps of bite-sized progress is indeed a battle that is big enough to matter. I now celebrate bite sized progress because as a product designing social entrepreneur, I know that I will not see large scale change over night. And that is okay because it is the nature of this work. Rather than letting these frustrations become the dominant force, I am learning to value patience. I believe that the young creative social entrepreneurs of today can be viewed as the millennial version of the ‘starving artist’ archetype; we have a message to communicate and an idea for a better world and are bootstrapping our way towards progress. We have a skill set to share with the world in a way that is not traditional, but it starts a meaningful conversation that our society needs to have via a designed experience. We act as a voice for the voiceless through creativity, and our work is never done as the creative process is infinite. We persevere in following our passion because battles that are small enough to win still matter in the grand scheme of social progress. Design is our vehicle for activating change.

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