Enter: The StackJack Water Filter

The last time I wrote was shortly after returning from Cambodia to do some needfinding with two of the other three members of my team, Albert and Danielle. The project we worked on as members of the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class was to design a water filter for rural schoolchildren in Cambodia. On our trip we met Sukha and his classmates, as well as other members of their families. They live in a village in rural Cambodia and have no running water.

Sukha and his classmates led us to our Point of View:

Carefree curious children at rural Cambodian schools need an educational and engaging way to provide themselves with clean drinking water so they can thrive and be examples of healthy behavior in their communities.

In Cambodia, untreated water and poor sanitation are the leading causes of 9.4 million cases of diarrhea per year, which leads to 10,000 deaths. Children are especially vulnerable: diarrheal disease kills 14 out of every 1000 children. Furthermore, 1.8 million Cambodian households lack access to clean water and sickness resulting from unclean water and poor sanitation costs Cambodian households 80 M in lost productivity and medical expenses each year. Our partner Hydrologic, a subsidiary of International Development Enterprises (IDE) Cambodia, aspires to become the leading distributor of effective and affordable hygiene and sanitation products in Cambodia.

My Extreme Team partnered with Hydrologic to develop a water purification system suitable for school use to complement Hydrologic’s Rabbit Water Filter Home line (so named because rabbits are seen as wise in Cambodia, despite their non-existence there!). It meets the need of providing an affordable and robust larger scale water filter for this particularly vulnerable and influential population.

Enter: The StackJack Rabbit Water Filter.

Our Functional Prototype, successfully tested with 2nd graders!

The StackJack filter has an innovative, low cost design featuring ceramic filtration technology -- the most effective water filtration technology widely available and locally producible in the Cambodian market. StackJack empowers children to provide themselves with clean water by lowering the access height for filter loading (with actual dimensions, not prototype dimensions) and increasing the ease of water transport. Its modular design also helps lifting because it decreases the volume of water carried per load and elicits the participation of multiple children loading together. The unique continuous flow element allows the holding volume of the filter to be scaled up or down for use in versatile settings, engages the senses when it is secured into place and the water starts to flow into the next module, and provides immediate feedback to the user. The StackJack water filter should be filled twice a day during the school’s morning and afternoon cleaning routines to provide 40L of filtered water per day. The attractive, modern design coupled with a reasonable price point make StackJack an ideal companion product for the Rabbit home filter.

Actual Piece Details:

Continuous Flow Mechanism Details:

Our Theory of Change (the big picture):

If rural schools have access to a community water filter, it will save families in the community money spent purifying water and treating the diseases that result from unpurified water, as well as improve children’s ability to study, socialize, and reach their education goals.

Additionally, we believe that children are agents of change in their communities and that they have the power and ability to change habits, creating a lasting behavior change and impact.

The presentation went wonderfully – it was really satisfying to see that the questions people asked us were about details of the filter, details that implied that they bought into the concept and were excited and thinking about the logistics of the installation and long-term maintenance of the StackJack filter.

Exit: Year 1 of Grad School.

A HUGE shout-out to the other members of my Extreme Team: Alexa Bisinger (MD/MBA 1), Danielle Garcia (GSB 1), and Albert Lai (MS, CS)!!

I arrived in Boston today to intern at IDEO this summer. Will do my best to update more often with summertime adventures!

Open/Closed Shadow Sign

I realize how infrequently I've updated the projects on here -- I distinctly remember looking at the second year students' blogs last year and wondering why they stopped posting. And I guess the answer is just that blogs are hard to keep up!

This is an outdoor sculptural sign that I created for an Art class. It's a miniature model, but the basic idea is that when the sun shines from one direction, it reads "open" and when it shines from the other side, it reads "closed". Ideally it'd be optimized to read most clearly at the time a place opens and closes (and the hours would change as the days got longer).

Needfinding in Cambodia

With the start of this quarter, I am attempting to restart my blog entries -- And so I am back from a week of "Needfinding" in Cambodia.

For one of my classes, "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability", my 4-person interdisciplinary team (two MBA students, one CS, and me) has been tasked to design a water filter for schools in villages in rural Cambodia. We are working with IDE, a non-profit that has been successful in selling home water filters and wants to develop a version for schools.

When we arrived, we initially conducted a sneak-visit on a school that had been given a prototype a year and a half ago to find out if the product was still in use. We arrived to find that the filter was being used, although the tap was broken. They were collecting the clean water in a bucket below the filter. "Okay, so far so good." And then we discovered that all members of the class were sharing a single cup and dipping it into the bucket of water, recontaminating the clean water.

...

When we probed a little deeper, we discovered that though the 10-year olds could explain to us that their mothers boiled water for them to bring to school to kill the microbes that live in the water and could make them sick, they had no idea how diseases are spread. "If your mother is sick, can you get sick from her?" "No," all students replied. "If I drink out of this cup and give it to you, is it clean?" "Yes," they said. Students also reported never having seen their teachers or parents wash hands with soap. Schools reported having no money to purchase soap. The village chief reported not prioritizing sanitation because safety was a more pressing concern.

The problem is clearly one that is much wider than we initially anticipated. We went on to learn more general sanitation issues in rural areas. 70% of Cambodians defecate in the fields -- which seems strange until you realize that if you don't understand germ theory and water contamination, the fields seem far cleaner than a latrine. They tried the ad campaign "no toilet, no wife" (which rhymes in Khmer) one year, but the director at UNICEF laughingly explained, "The farmers just looked around and said, 'well I don't have a toilet, but I have a wife, so that can't possibly be true!'"

Our trip was also a lot about learning about the Cambodian people. Everybody we met, from the villagers to the staff at IDE to the Director of Sanitation at UNICEF was incredibly warm and funny. I came away with an incredibly positive view of the sunny Cambodian people. But there is a dark side, as Cambodia is a country that is healing. Just 30 years ago, a genocide ended that killed 1/4 of the population. All those perceived to be educated - doctors, teachers, government, people with glasses - were executed, leaving every person in the country affected. This is something that we found rarely spoken of -- the children do not even learn about it in their school curriculum. When mentioned, tears immediately came to the eyes of grown men we spoke to.

Part of what this nightmarish history means is that today's Cambodians are used to living in the moment and appreciating what they have today. As such, it is hard to convince people of the importance of long-term investments such as preventative health, especially when money is so scarce. Visiting the country and learning its history and the day-to-day challenges of its people has definitely invested our team in our project. I am excited to have the opportunity to work with IDE this quarter.

Words of Wisdom - Courtesy of my Classes

Lessons that I want to remember and continue to strive towards from this quarter:

Courtesy of Art:

1. Design is the art form that is incomplete until it is engaged.

Courtesy of Improv:

1. Build on the ideas of others. Say "yes, and".

2. Make the other person look better than you.

3. Push yourself and cheerfully make mistakes.

Courtesy of Need-Finding:

1. Ask an open-ended question, listen, and pause for longer -- people always have more to say.

2. Look for disconnects between what people say and what they do.

3. All of our actions occur in the context of our cultural frames -- to understand the actions of another, we must try to understand their frame.

4. Stories and metaphors are incredibly powerful for communicating information.

5. Don't ignore discomfort. If you feel discomfort, either it means something is operating against your frame or it means something is operating against the other person's frame and you're picking up on it.

I'm waiting on the lessons from Extreme Affordability until next quarter.

In Need of a Tow

as you may or may not know, i am shadowing tow truck drivers for a project... practicing empathy, understanding their needs, etc. it turns out constantin, my tow truck driver, has been awesomely fun to shadow.

so. this morning, i sit in my car to go pick up martini, start the engine of my car, and of course, the gods of comedy prevent my gear shift from working. i am trapped in my car, trying desperately to drive to the AAA tow truck man.

i eventually give up, run out, and ask my roommate if i can borrow her car. i start the car (thank god i can drive stick.... my psychic dad TOLD me i might need it one day for an emergency!). i get out of stanford, and at the light, the car dies. I start it up again and two lights later, it dies again. i eventually get to the tow truck company, and alas, my keys are stuck in the car! Twenty minutes later, and after soliciting the advice of four people, I discover that old saabs require you to have the gear in REVERSE (not neutral!) in order to take the keys out. wow.

i shadow constantin, we retrieve a car from an underground parking lot, an old classic car that had been crushed by a tree branch, and a frenchwoman's land rover. i learn about his life, the $200,000 cafe he lost overnight, how it put him in the depths of despair, and allowed him to come out with a wife and a new career that he loves. as we come back to the office so he can drop me off, i joke, "i hope my car starts." "i'll stay and make sure it does," he says back. sure enough, the battery's dead (i still have no idea why), and i end up needing a jump start. i drive out of the lot, and two lights later, the engine dies again. i cross my fingers, and it starts up. four blocks later, it dies one more time. i start it up again, and will my way home.

i walk back to my apartment by my car, sitting motionless and in need of a tow.

Chiaroscuro

Well.... I have come to realize that much of what I'm working on this quarter will not be that visually appealing as that of last quarter. Except for art! As such, here is my first piece for Art 160, a chiaroscuro. I decided to go the charcoal route, rather than the photograph route and used a sculpture that was sitting in the loft as my subject.

Headboard Design