BoP Product Design & Testing in Urban Spaces Volume 1: From Idea to Prototype in 90 Minutes

The following is part of an ongoing blog series from the Rural Market Insight team at the Centre for Development Finance, IFMR.

Say you have a new design insight for a BoP consumer product. How long might it take to prototype your idea and deploy it for testing? This week we learned how quickly design insights can become tested prototypes in India’s urban spaces. Our product testers were an urban low-income household in Chennai, India with no electricity, cooking on a traditional double-burner cook stove (chulha) and using 10-12 liters of kerosene per month.

For the full photo-story in a better resolution, including the timeline and cost, click the image below…

To read more about the background to this Urban Spaces series, click here.

This series follows the activities of two researchers as they design, prototype and/or conduct user-testing of new and existing Base-of-Pyramid (BoP) consumer energy products among low-income urban households in Chennai. The theory is that urban spaces can be used to gain relevant design insights and user feedback on rural-targeted BoP products due to its rich diversity and ease for researchers and designers to quickly turn those insights into functional design changes.

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/