Catch-up

Long time, no blog.  My apologies.  I’ll here give a recap of the last few weeks and then I’ll go into more detail in some subsequent posts. . . 

The first four weeks of the project were focused on user research and resulted in the research summary document to which I’d posted a link at the end of February.  Coming out of the research phase, we transitioned into trying to come up with latrine ideas that met the needs and desires of the Cambodian villagers.  We started with a day-long ‘deep dive’ with the project’s core and advisory teams.  We then took some of the ideas from the workshop and some supplemental ideas and spent a week and a half building scaled prototypes of existing latrine components (and a few new ones) and generating some posters which illustrated simple upgrade paths.  Coming out of the early research, we weren’t highly convinced about the notion of upgradeability—whether people fully understood it or would be willing to engage in it.  Upgradeability was one of the premises of the project, so it seemed worth it to doublecheck.  

The field visit was only one two-hour group session in Kandal province--we were trying to be efficient—but it wasn’t highly inspiring (more detail to follow).  So we decided to take the same protos to Svey Rieng for a longer, more in-depth visit to include one-on-ones with villagers and masons.   That was much better.  We also started to build full-scale prototypes of rings, pans and slabs and have just taken those to the field this past week.  During the last few weeks, the IDE office also had a weeklong offsite to Mondulkiri (which I hear was a great time, though I couldn’t attend), I went to New Zealand for a bit of a holiday and this particular week is Khmer New Year.  I think it’s now the year of the cow.  Khmer New Year’s a big holiday, so the IDE office shut down except for me and Olaf (a Norwegian gent who’s leading up IDE’s water filter business).  In fact, pretty much the whole city shut down because all the Khmer have gone out to the provinces to visit family and the expats have gone on holiday.  I haven’t biked on such peaceful streets in a very long time.