Prelude: While many may think the use of wood/biofuel-burning stoves (chulha) is mainly a characteristic of rural India, a large percentage of urban households also use these stoves. In fact, according to the 61st round of the National Sample Survey (2004-05), approximately 22% of urban households use firewood and chips as their primary cooking fuel.
As the trend of urbanization continues to skyrocket, families from all over India are flocking to the cities and bringing with them their traditional cooking practices. To gain a sense of cooking practices of low income households in our home city, we took a walk down the small lane next to our office in Chennai. During our stroll we were somewhat surprised to find five different styles of wood-burning stoves in use along a 100m stretch of road. We even found a potter in the nearby market who creates and sells his own style of wood-burning stoves for urban households.
This afternoon stroll from the office raised an interesting question: Can companies and organizations who design products for BoP consumers use urban settings for early stage design research? Our stroll revealed a close clustering of low income households from regions all across India. This regional diversity has the potential to provide a rich, and extremely efficient, context for design research. Additionally, the close proximity to local welders, potters and hardware stores can facilitate rapid prototyping and redeployment that leverages insights gained from user interactions. And, perhaps most importantly, the close proximity of the research site promotes more frequent and sustained interaction with users.To determine the potential and limitations of conducting user research in urban settings for products intended for a rural BoP consumer base, we are currently piloting a study involving a number of products and households in close proximity to our office. Stayed tuned over the next few months for updates on our findings.
The photos in this first installment show just a small selection of the wood-burning stoves we found in-use next to our office and the area we plan to test some of these products.
Selvan Thandapani and Richard Woodbridge are researchers for the Rural Market Insight team at the Centre for Development Finance, IFMR, located in Chennai, India. http://www.ifmr-cdf.in/
4 comments:
I am not very clear of what you plan to do,sorry if I have jumped the gun.
But I would like to warn here, if you are working on cooking stoves, of reinventing the wheel.There is enough of good work done in this country. so I hope you will not end up designing a cooking stove. if at all you are doing it, a thorough study of the work already done should be done.
Well the last BJP Govt increased the number of LPG connections from 2Cr to 8Cr, and the present Govt plans to increase it by between 5.5Cr to 11Cr depending on availability of cylinder production (not LPG). This is to solve the smoke and the cooking speed problem. I would see the non-LPG stoves going into back-burner, pun unintended, soon.
If there is a reason why on the fringes of urbanity we're still seeing 'traditional' cooking fuels, it is because there is a concenration on sending new LPG connections only to rural areas. If Chennai were to adopt piped gas, like Mumbai and Baroda have, then cylinders will again be in good supply and you will see little huts using LPG. One other limiter in adoption is the cost of the LPG stove itself. Pretty soon you will see manufacturers with scale bring smaller versions to address this market. LPG will be both a cheaper and cleaner option then. Market history has shown that the relatively-poor pay as much as the relatively-rich for a product or service that solves a bigger problem for them.
That said, it isnt apparent what you are trying to do. Are you creating a new wood stove? There are many of them trying to create an organised base, but truth be told, they seem to have no adoption base of note i.e. their numbers still look very small.
Thank you, Sanjith and Vinay Rao for your comments. The answer to both your questions is no, we are not creating a new wood stove or any other products for the BoP. Definitely no need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we are interested in testing our theory that urban spaces can be a valuable platform in which to test rural-targeted BoP products due to its rich diversity and close proximity for researchers and designers to gain quick insights.
Any of the prototypes we design from scratch in this series are simply to test the ease of making quick design changes using user feedback and local resources. We will also be testing our theory using some of the newest models of eco-stoves and solar lighting solutions currently on the market.
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