Thursday 22 April 2010

The Improved Cook Stove: Looking at an Age-Old Problem with a New-Age Design Solution

A quick search on the history of cook stoves using Google's nifty timeline feature provides a snapshot reaching back to the 1740's, when one of the Founding Fathers of the US, Ben Franklin, began pondering the problem of inefficient cook stoves.



“…[Benjamin Franklin] devised means to correct the excessive smoking of chimneys and invented, around 1744, the Franklin stove, which furnished greater heat with a reduced consumption of fuel.” (Source: http://www.fjcollazo.com/fjc_publishings/documents/BFranklin.htm)

Fast-forward over two hundred and fifty years to today as the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is in the process of launching a new program, the National Biomass Cookstove Initiative. The program is aligned with the recent global focus on the harmful effects of black carbon emissions related to global warming and the health impacts of indoor air pollution on respiratory health. If successful, this program has the potential to have a profound impact on improving individual health and reducing black carbon emissions and across rural India. Unfortunately, after nearly thirty years of research studies, countless failed initiatives and dozens of improved stove models, many of the core challenges that have existed for decades have not yet been overcome or even addressed.

In order to gain a base level understanding of the challenges associated with cook stove design and adoption, CDF’s Rural Market Insight (RMI) team conducted a 6-week scan of cooking practices across five states in India. We wanted to take a fresh look at cooking practices to determine what factors do, and should, influence cook stove design. Our exploration revealed insight into the many complexities of cooking and made evident the frictions that exist between the user and the current selection of stoves in the market.

Despite impressive gains that have been made in improving the emissions performance of stoves and driving their cost down, it seems that many improved cook stoves still do not seamlessly fit into the lives and routines of the user. This is something we have seen time again throughout many of our field visits as well as user experience research we recently completed in an urban context.This can, and has, resulted in less than ideal user adoption of improved cook stoves. Even those using these improved stoves are sometimes using them differently than expected, so that the performance in the field is unlike the results that were concluded in the laboratory.

The RMI team put together a short video capturing some perspectives we gained from our field research. With the many advances in technical design and performance of improved cook stoves, we feel it is time to turn our collective attention to user adoption, which necessitates putting the user at the centre of the design process. Ben Franklin would likely be shocked to see that we are still grappling with the age-old problem of inefficient cook stoves and harmful cook stove emissions. Wouldn’t it be nice for your next Google timeline search to finally show an article for a solution to this age-old problem?
Pooja Bhatia and Selvan Thandapani, Researchers for the Rural Market Insight team, contributed to this post. We’d like to extend a special thanks to David Fuente for his guidance throughout the project.
Posted by pooja bhatia at 4:14 PM
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