SELCO - Urban Community Lab

BRIEF

SELCO is a for profit organisation that has different community labs to help under-served people from various socio-economic backgrounds.

This project was a part of the urban community lab. Many communities that the Urban Community Lab operates with in have severe lack water supply. Women, Men and children travel anywhere between 0.5-3km to fill water and carry it back to their homes. Each person can carry up to two pots and spend a large chunk of time every- day doing this activity.Women com- plain of body aches and also say that this is the worst and the only major problem they face.

The idea was to design a product which will help them carry more water, more comfortably, keeping in mind all the aspects of their situation, prototyping costs, entrepreneurial systems.

RESEARCH

We were operating in the Lingarajapuram slum of bangalore city. During our research phase, we went to different slums and labour camps and asked people questions about their water sourcing and usage, recorded interviews and had a hands on experience with the way they transport water.It was also accompanied by online secondary research.

CONCEPTUALIZATION & PROTOTYPING

After research and need analysis, we created a design brief for ourselves. This proceeded with ideation, brainstorming and presenttions along with community members in small temporary slum houses.

Design brief:

-To reduce time and effort put into transporting water.
-To create safe , hygenic storage.
-To create products and systems that can be later handled by the locals and

SELCO completely detaches itself from the process.
-To use readily available products so that they can be easily replaced ,repaired and replicated.

All the questionnaires were fed to an excel sheet to be analysed later.A need analysis report was made. Following is a part of the research compilation.

PROBLEMS FACED.

: No access to Kaveri Water
: Cannot afford to buy water from cycle wallahs

: No fixed source of water

CONCEPT : Rent-a-cart

Basic idea : To provide access to a cart that enable them to get enough water for two days in one trip. (instead of making four trips in one day) and to have a sustainable business model by renting it out for Rs. 3 per trip which would fend them 100 litres (enough for two days) as opposed to cycle wallahs selling 15 litres for Rs.2-3. This business model would also empower women staying back in the slums due to their children, as they would be the ideal candidates to run it from with in the slum itself.

DESIGNING A CART

We discussed various existing designs and solution accross the world during our co-creation workshop and carried out excercises to figure out their priorities and conveniences.

Our first design was to use existing bisleri bottles as the containers that can be carried 4-5 at a time in a wheel barrow.This can carry upto 100 litres of water in one go, which is around 2 days of water consumption by a family of 4 people.

It was integral we improvised with readily available products to ensure familiarity, easy repair and replacement once SELCO is no more a stake holder in this social enterprise.