The Nepal Design Worksop 2015 – a small incident

The 2015 Nepal Design workshop was a big event and over the next week you will see some of the results posted here. But for now a small incident linking the past and present and showing how essential the development of good tools are to design work.

When explaining why the current school toilet, just constructed, would fail in a short period of time due to the lack of a functioning wastewater  treatment system, the school committee was not convinced. Surely the toilet waste would drop into the pit below the toilets and disappear without trace!!

Bishnu Shrestha, the Nepal program manager, had the foresight to load the Septic Tank animation (see the animation by clicking here
) onto his phone and within minutes the committee had a new view about treating human waste safely. Quickly the discussion moved onto the design of two new wastewater systems – one for the proposed girl toilets and one for the modified boys toilet – designed and sized carefully to cope with the waste of 600 students and teachers.

This apparently simple animation has had over 440,000 viewings on YouTube and was originally crafted by Judith Torzillo. It is now an indispensable part of the HH design toolkit. 

Bishnu discusses wastewater  issues and health with the school committee chair.