Case Study on Co-Design Methodology for Improved Cook Stove Solutions for Rural Community in India

Coming up with innovative solutions which have the potential and reach to scale up to masses is crucial to solve rural challenges and bring about their upliftment. Many technologies or technology-based solutions fail to create a change or an impact on the beneficiaries due to various reasons. One of the prominent reasons being the lack of ability to engage the community in designing the solution. This paper discusses in detail the co-design methodology that was used to design and develop an innovative and acceptable cooking stove for a rural community in Odisha. The workshop on co-design was conducted as part of the experiential learning program called Live-in-Labs®. In this process, the interdisciplinary team of students along with the village women collaboratively engaged in the design process. The preparation, plan, and implementation of a co-design workshop for design and development of an improved cook stove is presented in this paper. The workshop, which spanned for 4 days, enabled an effective user acceptance of the designer intervention. We have recorded the tools and methodologies we used that is discussed in detail here. The paper also captures the interactions among the designers and users where large disparity in terms of knowledge, language, gender and age was observed. The observed favorable and unfavorable factors are discussed in detail. We found that the level of engagement is directly proportional to the level of ownership (of the mutually developed solution) by the community, thus ensuring sustainability.