24 Sep 2024
An innovative waterless squatting toilet, designed by a team of masters students and an associate professor from the Department of Industrial Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, has been awarded as a project finalist in the recently announced Don Norman Design Award.
Don Norman Design Award (DNDA) is a global platform for early-career practitioners and educational organisations to showcase projects that impact society.
According to the team’s research, about four billion people use squat toilets around the globe, including most of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.
Vicente Esteban, the Principal Investigator, Master’s Program Director and associate professor at the department, says that the waterless squatting toilet is an eco-friendly alternative to traditional flushing toilets.
“It is specifically designed for defecation issues in communities displaced by climate, natural, and other humanitarian crises, and for the elderly and less able people in rural China.
“Our design brings several solutions for these users. It is a walk-in and walk-out platform, thus, the user does not need to turn around to squat. It has railings to access the platform and to hold while squatting to lie down and stand up.
“The technical innovation begins with the flushing system, the box contains the fine wood shavings to cover the human waste, and has three functions in one: When pulling the handle: it opens the toilet lid, places the wooden chips inside, and also makes the collecting bucket rotate, allowing more wood shavings to be inside, and helping minimise the times that it needs to be emptied,” he explains.
The team has been very careful in applying the same principles as the toilets produced by their sponsor, Biolan, a Finnish company who manufactures and sells products for ecological gardening, to ensure that this design could be mass-produced with the same materials and techniques the company currently uses.
Esteban says: “This is a social innovation project that we hope can be produced and disseminated in places that need a simple and effective solution that can bring safety and comfort to elderly and less able people.
“In our research phase, we found many companies that have designed simple and efficient waterless toilets. As a small design team, we believed that reinventing a product designed for so long would be really challenging; thus, we decided to apply a social innovation approach to this project.”
Other than Vicente Esteban, the team includes Industrial Design masters students Ran Tao, Zili Zeng, Wenting Li, Tianshi Zhu, Ferdinand Odongo, and Ke Meng. They were also advised by Dr Cheng-Hung Lo, Head of the Department of Industrial Design.
By Yi Qian
Images courtesy of Department of Industrial Design
24 Sep 2024