Designing a digital solution to help practitioners choose effective sanitation technologies in refugee crises
The problem…
When a crisis hits, entire households are forced to pack up and seek refuge somewhere safe. In humanitarian contexts, this is often a temporary camp that gets built up virtually overnight. With thousands of people coming to a site with no permanent infrastructure, a sanitation system quickly becomes one of the most pressing needs.
The design team knew that these camps were often built with inappropriate sanitation technologies that were polluting the environment and exposing those living in camps and the surrounding communities to serious health risks. I was brought in as a researcher to help the design team explore the “why” behind the problem—how these decisions were being made, and who was actually making them.
Design challenge: Support users to choose appropriate sanitation technologies in an emergency response.
My role: Research lead in a team with three sanitation engineers and one sustainable sanitation specialist. I developed the research design and tools, managed data collection, carried out data analysis, and prepared key research deliverables.
Types of research: Generative, mixed-methods, and behavioral research
Design phases: Empathize → Design → Ideate → Prototype
Methods and tools: Designing for behavior change, barrier analysis, desk research, content analysis, user observation, in-context user interviews, survey, inferential and descriptive data analysis, qualitative data analysis, participatory design workshop
To design a solution, the team needed to understand…
how do potential users actually make decisions on what sanitation technologies to use, and what could support them to make better decisions? Working with the research stakeholders, we aimed to address the following research questions:
Who are our potential users? Who makes decisions about sanitation technologies in an emergency response?
How are they choosing sanitation technologies? What are their motivations, goals, and pain points in the decision making process?
What problems could we solve for our potential users that would help them to choose more appropriate technologies?
So, I developed a research plan…
with a mixed-methods design. I drew on the Designing for Behavior Change framework, which applies psychology and behavioral economics. I used a barrier analysis approach that would help the design team identify obstacles to behavior change considering our potential users’ motivations, capacity, and context.
Our team was resource constrained and I was the only researcher on the team, so we couldn’t send researchers into the field for data collection. So, I developed protocols and trained the sanitation engineers and specialist on the research team to do data collection during their regular field deployments. I managed the data collection, survey, and secondary research remotely.
We implemented…
Desk research
on sanitation technologies and solutions that were already available for practitioners.
Content analysis
of 33 existing resources on sanitation in humanitarian response to see what content they covered and how accessible they were.
Then, I refined our tools and we carried out primary data collection…
User observation
of sanitation decision makers in real-time humanitarian responses in Iraq, northeast Syria, and the Congo.
In-context user interviews
with nine potential users making sanitation decisions in real-time humanitarian responses.
Online survey
with nearly 100 potential users on their professional and personal profile, information access and use, and their motivations, goals, and pain points in making decisions on sanitation technologies.
Once we had the data, I did quantitative and qualitative analysis and worked with the sanitation engineers and specialist on the research team to pull out key findings. They brought together research stakeholders for a…
Design workshop
with research stakeholders to engage with findings and collaboratively brainstorm solutions that could enable better decision making.
“You don’t experiment with communities at risk. I think that is a very important point—we shouldn’t be testing ideas, we should be sure it works before we do it. Knowledge is not really the problem—I have worked with people with lots of knowledge and experience. Perhaps willingness to accept different types of solutions – yes.”
- User interview
“The guidance for Ebola—setting up the camps, setting up the treatment systems—was not clear, and nobody had done that before. There is only a certain amount that you can train on before going out into the field, so you need to be able to access information and make decisions while you’re there. If you have good internet then you have access to the whole world, and if you don’t then you’re on your own. So it’s really about technology—you can put a lot of things on phone apps and we could be much smarter than we are. Anyone who carries a phone around has an enormous amount of power in their back pocket.”
- User interview
Summary of content analysis of existing resource materials
Group work on technical, non-technical, and knowledge and experience barriers from design workshop participants
“One organization had internal manuals and best practices that it tried to keep updated all the time, but it is a difficult and slow process to get new ideas introduced into those. So people tend to work with what they know and what is safe first.”
- User interview
“It depends on the organization—some have technical people in their headquarters that will assist and give guidance. Others, either you don’t know the contact or it isn’t feasible to contact them.”
- User interview
“If it wasn’t included in the planning, you probably won’t be able to cover the costs of the technology, and you might have to renegotiate with donors and critical partners like the government. I think guidance should cover how to actually plan for technologies and how to budget for them, not just how to implement them.”
- User interview
We identified the following key research insights…
Our potential users were often not sanitation specialists or engineers--in real time, decisions were often made by whoever was on the ground, regardless of their background or expertise.
Our potential users were rarely consulting any kind of guidance to make decisions, and those with less experience were even less likely to look at resources or guidance.
Potential users needed real-time support.
Our potential users were very risk averse—in order to try something new, they needed to feel confident knowing it had worked before in a similar context under similar constraints
Existing resources focused on toilet facility design, and had limited guidance on the treatment and disposal stages of the sanitation chain, which was also overlooked in the Sphere Project standards for effective humanitarian response.
Existing resources were also often only available in English, and many were cost prohibitive.
And as a result of the research…
The design team developed a prototype of an online collaborative platform to support learning and decision making called the Operational Collaborative Tool for Ongoing Practices in Urgent Sanitation (OCTOPUS). On OCTOPUS, users can document their experiences, discover solutions implemented by others, and compare solutions and technologies. These cases are filed by crisis context and treatment objectives. Users can also live chat with a sanitation expert. The site can also be accessed in both French and English, covering the operating languages of humanitarian organizations in emergency responses around the world.
I also developed the research into a report, which the research stakeholders used to successfully advocate for the Sphere Project to revise their humanitarian standards to include the transport, disposal, and treatment of waste in humanitarian response. Donors are now using these standards as accountability benchmarks for thousands of projects being implemented by NGOs in humanitarian responses around the world.
