What’s the design?

All over the world, people cook indoors without proper ventilation—an everyday and seemingly harmless activity that actually contributes to millions of premature deaths every year. The Chulha stove by Phillips Experience Design makes cooking indoors safer – it’s efficiently heated, requires less fuel and traps toxic fumes with clay tablets that capture smoke particles. The design has gone through three iterations before gaining the familiarity, attractiveness and usability needed to be implemented in India, Guatemala and East Africa.

The hurdle

Philips Experience design has long been a household name in domestic appliances. Simona Rocchi, the Senior Director of Design-for-Sustainability & Innovation at Philips, says the work on Chulha stemmed from a willingness to innovate and drive the company’s impact further.

They chose to create the Chulha due to the massive air pollution problem resulting from cooking with biomass, which causes close to 4M deaths yearly, particularly among women and children. “We tried to not only understand cooking needs in local physical and socio-cultural environments but, also empathise with requirements and aspirations,” explains Rocchi. “To think about the context of the solution, what the challenges out there were and find an approach to understand the future customer.”

Creating a stove able to accommodate age-old traditions while making it safer, affordable and appealing to the users was the challenge ahead: “You need to consider the cooking habits of the vast populations, the various cultures, rituals and traditions,” says Rocchi. But Philips had a clear vision to face the obstacles head-on: “We wanted to create a solution that could fit local contextual requirements, be locally produced and distributed, and could also enable socio-economic development.” 

The strategy

Understanding the customer and localising solutions were the key components to make Chulha a success, Rocchi explains. So instead of Philips’ designing solo from afar, the company engaged local actors in India to create a collaborative network bringing on board different contributions at different stages of the project. They started working with an NGO that helped them understand the solution's technical aspects. And once the design specifications were ready, they collaborated with others that were more focused on impact, distribution, production and local development of entrepreneurship.

These local actors were instrumental in driving the solution forward and helped enable a broad impact. And for Philips, the collaborative process was key to gaining new insights in contexts where they weren’t currently operating. “By entering a conversation with people working in the field, we learned how to co-create together more inclusive and therefore long-lasting solutions,” says Rocchi.

Although Chulha was designed with Indian cooking traditions in mind, it quickly gained attention from regions with similar cooking habits in contexts with similar challenges. NGOs from East Africa and Guatemala started approaching Philips, resulting in Chulha’s new iterations to accommodate slightly different requirements. This also gave Philips some key insights about scaling, according to Rocchi. “It became more and more clear how the scaling wasn’t as much about understanding the technical expectations for product adjustment but, more about understanding the strategy to leverage the networks and the resources in specific local contexts for more effective deployment and distribution.”

“To me, the beauty of Chulha is that it’s a toolkit that empowers people to become active in the business of producing and distributing the stoves.” That’s also why Rocchi doesn’t see Chulha as a finished or perfected solution. “I can send you the design specifications, but you have to contextualise them. It’s not just about the design and the mould, but the key is a clear understanding of the context that it has to serve and how to best leverage the local network that can effectively help to address local needs.”

Tips from the designer

• Co-create with the locals – Engaging with local actors and potential users is fundamental. It won’t only lead to better solutions but will yield valuable lessons to apply to your future collaborations.
• Embrace open-source strategies – The more people on the project, the greater the impact. If possible, consider having your solution open-source. This will empower the community to customise the solution to ensure more needs are met.
• Don’t neglect local rituals – Often, the most advanced solution isn’t the right one. Tune in to what traditions or cultural practices are important to your users and maintain them in your design. A great solution offers a new way of doing something while still being intuitive to the user.

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Image: Philips/Harald Voglhuber