2020
Design Consultant / Service Design
Desolenator is a London-based clean-tech company that builds 100% solar-powered water purification systems. In 2018 they took on a hard problem: bringing clean drinking water to a town of 4,000 people in the Sundarbans, a low-lying coastal region of West Bengal where rising sea levels have made groundwater undrinkable.
Building the desalination plant was only half the work. The harder question was how a community without prior infrastructure would access, manage, and sustain the water once it existed.
I worked alongside WaterAid, the Sundarbans Social Development Centre, and researchers from the University of Strathclyde to design a community-led distribution service — one that creates employment for local women micro-entrepreneurs and adapts to the daily realities of life in South 24 Parganas.
Collaborators—Arch. Meher Singh, WaterAid, SSDC, University of Strathclyde
Building the desalination plant was only half the work. The harder question was how a community without prior infrastructure would access, manage, and sustain the water once it existed.
I worked alongside WaterAid, the Sundarbans Social Development Centre, and researchers from the University of Strathclyde to design a community-led distribution service — one that creates employment for local women micro-entrepreneurs and adapts to the daily realities of life in South 24 Parganas.
Collaborators—Arch. Meher Singh, WaterAid, SSDC, University of Strathclyde