Trip Report #2 : Sololá Market : Friday 8/21

On Friday we woke at 5am and drove a couple hours into the mountains to a traditional Mayan market.

We were to split into small groups and observe market behaviors:
+ What types of goods are being sold?
+ Who is buying them? (age, gender, class)
+ How are they being marketed?

A summary of our observations includes:
+ Goods sold: food, herbs, medicines, furniture, kitchen goods, basic tools
+ Everything is cheap: in quality and price
+ People have little trust in goods so aren't willing to pay much for them (which means only cheap goods are on the market) ... chicken & egg situation
+ The streets with brick & mortar shops garner a little more trust with consumers. Most of their product is bought in the city.
+ Many shops show their product in use to demonstrate quality (see fruit samples photo). There was also a man selling scissors, cutting various materials to show their strength.
+ There is very little differentiation between sellers. Preference is given to sellers whom the buyers have a personal relation with.

Here is a short video I took just to show the atmosphere at the market. It's a bit shaky, but it ends up conveying the crowded and hustled feeling quite well.



Later in the trip we decided this wasn't a good venue for our filter. People want a water filter to be reliable and the price and design can reflect that. This is inconsistent with how these markets work where things are either temporary (food) or cheap (used light switches, scissors, unfinished wood furniture, etc.)

Trip Report #1 : Thursday 8/20

I'm going to do a few posts that cover the trip chronologically.

I wish I could have posted each day during the trip, but that just wasn't possible without paying AT&T an exorbitant sum.

The trip began with a visit to Landivar University which the Guatemalan students attend. We had a couple lectures on research procedures and Guatemalan culture. Mostly review of things we covered over the summer.

The main take-away from Ken was to observe:
+ What can you see in other people's lives?
+ What product/system can be put in place to help someone make money?
+ What can they sell?
+ What can save them money?
+ What can improve their health?

The next day we would visit a brick and tile maker and TPS (Tecnologia Para la Salud) which makes dry-composting latrines, wood stoves, water pumps and other products that help people live healthy lives.

One of our teams (Diego, Orlando and Mallika) would work with the brick and tile people for the rest of the trip to optimize their production process and see what kinds of opportunities they could find to increase business, improve health, etc.

TPS was an opportunity for the wood stove group (Pablo and Stephen) and us, the water filter group, to speak with someone who distributes this type of product to Guatemalans and has direct experience with the people, production process and the distribution.

Post Trip To-Do List

We're all back and had the most amazing and productive time in Guatemala.

Before I share the day-to-day details and photos I wanted to put up the post-trip to-do list. All these are products of the tremendously helpful feedback we got from surveying people about water use, water perception and feedback on last year's prototypes. We were able to talk to many groups of people, men/women, different ages and income levels, rural/urban. Monica will continue to interview people and get feedback on each iteration of the prototype now that Peter and I have returned to LA.

Design/Engineering
1. Label / Packaging
2. Fix Leaks (fewer segments)
3. Bendable - to fit in tight spots
4. Make it easy to replace carbon reliably
5. Make appearance model(s) and send to Monica for surveying

Science
6. Formalize sampling procedure
+ supply list: filter(s), carbon, bottles/bags, knife, wrench, alcohol, clean rags, garbage bag, ladel)
+ better science: eliminate contamination by not opening filter on site, clean faucets and filters to prevent cross-contamination
7. Get test results from lab and see where prototypes stand
8. Determine component lifetimes
9. Determine amount of carbon necessary

Business
10. Determine available materials + costs
11. Analyze surveys to determine costs of existing water
12. Determine product price (using #6 and #7)
13. Distribution model and advertising
14. Target Markets
15. Research possible product guarantee - organizations, govt
16. Business plan - phases

Leaving tomorrow!

We're leaving Tuesday night from LAX.

Peter and I were supposed to get last year's prototypes from Edgardo before leaving so that we can test them in Guatemala. It will be a real shame if we can't get them in time. One of the things we must do is get user feedback from the 7 or so prototypes that we have so that we know what kind of tweaks to make regarding function or fitting it to various faucets, adapting to user behaviors and expectations of how something should be if drinking water is coming out of it.

Hopefully we'll have some photos of it in use put up here soon.

HW #2 & #3 : Anthropological Indicators

Our second HW assignment was about listing our hypotheses going into the project. We broke these down into Business-, Functional-, People- and Team-related. We also needed to come up with a set of questions that we'll be answering in our research.

Homework three involved reading a report on cultural indicators from Luzmi, one of our instructors who is a Guatemalan anthropologist. We were to then apply these different categories of indicators (technological, cultural identity, cultural friendliness, etc.) to our project/research. We were also to list our group's strengths and weaknesses and problems we may encounter.

Check it out. It's a brief slide show.

Why we are starting this blog

The Guatefilter blog exists to track our progress through this collaborative process. We are part of a class — E/ME 105, Product Design for the Developing World — that is a joint effort of Caltech (Pasadena), Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) and Universidad Rafael Landivar (Guatemala City).

Guatefilter is the name for our project which is building on one of last year's projects, the AWA water filter.

This blog should serve as an online process book, so we can neatly document our weekly progress which includes a trip to Guatemala from August 19th to the 27th. We hope to regularly update it during the trip and throughout the course which begins in September 2009.

Ultimately it will serve as a way to inform others about the project and as a record for us as the project moves along. If the project is passed on to another team in Fall 2010, they could build on it as well.

cheers
matt