The Importance of Human-Centered Design in Water Projects
Community members are gathered here for a WASH education initiative, led by our partners at SDS.
At 33 Buckets, we pride ourselves in designing clean water solutions that prioritize the user’s needs, desires, and way of life. As an engineering-based team, human-centered design is at the heart of everything we do. As the User Experience Design Intern at 33 Buckets, I wanted to show you why human-centered design is key to making lasting change.
My background as a Human Systems Engineering major at Arizona State University is highly relevant to 33 Bucket’s approach to designing solutions. In Human Systems Engineering, we aim to solve problems taking into account engineering, design, and psychology. This interdisciplinary approach is integral to human-centered design principles and 33 Buckets’ approach to clean water solutions.
Human-centered design is needed everywhere.
When human-centered design is not taken into consideration, disasters can occur. In 2006, a patient suffering from a strep infection arrived at St Mary’s hospital in Madison, Wisconsin to deliver her baby. During her delivery, she required epidural pain medication. Epidural must be delivered to the space between the spine and the spinal cord. It is deadly if it enters the bloodstream. However, when the nurse returned to the patient’s room, another nurse handed her a bag of intravenous penicillin to treat the patient’s strep throat. The bags of penicillin and epidural medicine were so similar that the nurse mistakenly connected the bag of epidural to the infusion pump into the bloodstream, resulting in the death of the patient (1).
This case highlights the successes and failures of a product based on human systems engineering and human-centered design.
Human-centered design focuses on keeping the end user at the center of every design and problem-solving endeavor. The intent is to empower the individual with personalized solutions tailored to suit them. It never places blame on the user if something were to fail, and it constantly evaluates the design in order to understand the path to improvement. The nurse should not carry the entire blame in the previous example - the designers of the similar bags did not consider the fatal situation of a potential mixup.
Norman Doors expose our instinct to pull on an handle. Designers need to consider how people naturally operate.
One classic example of a simple solution that keeps the user in mind is push/pull doors. Have you ever encountered a door in a public building where you tried to pull, instead of push, to open it? Did you ever feel a little flustered, thinking “how could I make that mistake?” Don’t blame yourself. Blame the designer of the door.
These are called Norman doors, which were coined after Don Norman, a famous designer who realized this was a problem not about people misunderstanding the way that doors worked, but about the design of the doors themselves. Putting handles on both sides of the door simply engages our cognitive tendency to pull on them, even if they are meant to be pushed.
By removing the handle on the ‘Push’ side of the door, we avoid the confusion and make people’s lives easier.
Simple but effective. Remove the handle on the ‘Push’ end so that people instinctively know what to do.
While these examples may feel very product-driven, know that human-centered design is a way of thinking and a powerful tool. That means it can be applied to more than just product or systems design. It can also be applied to the realm of social change.
“It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker, it has to be ‘us with them.’”
At 33 Buckets, human-centered design is at the core of every solution we design and community we partner with. As the previous examples show, even the smallest details must consider who is actually using the product or service, or else it will eventually fail. According to UNICEF, anywhere from 30% to 50% of clean water projects fail within 5 years of implementation, leaving recipients back to square one - or even worse off. By implementing a “solution” that fails to take into account the actual user, we get pit latrines in India that barely survive a year due to improper construction and no solution on who actually empties the overfilled toilets. Another example is a rain catchment system in Ethopia that touts its improved water source but fails to realize that there is simply not enough rainfall year-round to supply a community.
Other organizations have concluded that lack of follow-up is the failure point for these clean water systems. While we recognize the importance of continued support, we at 33 Buckets want to address the issue of why these systems are failing in the first place.
No community is the same, and we understand the need to design for their unique needs.
Just like the Norman doors and just like the fatal hospital error, many water projects don’t consider the user. Each community is unique, and a solution that works in one region may not produce the same result in another. Every 33 Buckets solution is carefully designed to serve the community’s needs based on a thorough assessment.
We work not only to make sure that communities achieve access to clean water, but also, and more importantly, to empower the communities with the knowledge and resources to sustain clean water access for generations. We ensure that our clean water projects are designed for longevity through these measures:
Before launching any projects, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative assessment to understand technical issues as well as perceptions and behaviors in the community.
Water quality testing
Physical infrastructure assessment
Household interviews and surveys
Interviews with community leaders and water managers
General understanding of social, cultural, and political factors in the region
When preparing for implementation, we work directly with our local community partner.
Ensure approval of community members
Identify locally available resources and laborers
In each implementation project, we emphasize education and training.
Direct training of local water management teams on new technologies and methods
Deliver translated operations and maintenance manuals and logs to record the results of water quality tests over time
WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) education focused on fostering a culture that values clean water and sanitation, especially in the youth
Following each implementation, we maintain communication with our local partner, community leaders, and water managers to ensure all systems are functioning and that operations and maintenance are clearly understood and valued.
Last year, due to COVID, we adapted to changing travel restrictions and the pressing needs of our partner communities. We launched a successful COVD-19 Prevention Campaign in order to raise the funds needed to provide the families with proper sanitation and educational material to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which was already raising alarms in Peru. We implemented centrally-located hand-washing stations equipped with foot pedals, eliminating the use of hands to operate the faucets. This simple, yet effective implementation eases the use of these hand washing stations while keeping in mind the risk of infection. See the numbers and the impact of our campaign in these communities.
Thank you for reading and learning about the value of human-centered design. Our work at 33 Buckets would not be possible without your continued support.
Visit our Project Pages to see how each community we work with has had a unique water solution. Support our cause by donating, following us through social media, and subscribing to our newsletter.