SAFE AGUA CHILE: The Last Drop

Submitted by Diana Corrales on January 15, 2010 - 2:01pm

We have come to the last episode of SAFE AGUA CHILE, a project in partnership with Un Techo Para Mi Pais, led by 12 students from the Art Center College of Design. The students traveled to Santiago, Chile and spent 12 days among the poorest families living in slums/campamentos. Week by week we have witnessed how the students develop new tools for using, storing, and transporting water to improve the quality of life of impoverished families. Today, we want to give thanks to those who have been following us since our first episode, as well as to those of you who are just in time to follow step by step and drop to drop the exciting journey of a life changing project.

The students' major challenge was to create extremely low-cost but real world potential implementation products that could help break the cycle of poverty. But in order to achieve this, they first had to understand what it is like to live in a day in the lives of these families. As Elizabeth Bayne mentioned in her testimony: "The opportunity to really meet the people that [we] are designing for and get to know their aspirations is a strong point in the project..." The students were able to connect to the families and make a change in their lives through innovation and passion.

After returning from Chile, the 12 students worked in teams throughout the Fall 2009 term, designing and fabricating low-cost, innovative prototypes intended to solve specific water-related needs identified through field research. In developing projects that complemented one another, the entire class worked toward the larger holistic goal of improving the quality of life for families living in the campamentos. Click on the following list of solutions to learn more:

Potable Drinking Water: A family-sized kit for water chlorination and filtration, to ensure safe, easy, pure water for drinking and cooking.
Pressurized Water System: A system that harnesses gravity to afford families the ease, convenience, and dignity of turning on a tap to get running water.
Warm Shower: Brings the dignity and wellbeing of a hot shower to people living with no running water and inconsistent electricity.
Community Laundry: A community laundry facility that aims to save time and effort, reduce task-related injuries, build social relationships and create income opportunities for women.
Indoor Dishwasher Workstation: An inexpensive and efficient kitchen workstation for washing dishes indoors and facilitating the re-use of water.
Sustainable Innovation: A strategy for sharing and inspiring innovations by people in the campamentos, via a monthly publication, competition, and online information hub.

These solutions/products created by the students were all presented to the community and it has been proven to have a positive impact and change in the lifestyles of locals. For instance, 20 families in campamentos are sharing the shower, keeping it an average of 4 days each to test it and they seem to love it.

We want to make a special recognition to each of the students that were part of the SAFE AGUA CHILE project: Elizabeth Bayne, Nubia Mercado, Stella Hernandez, Diane Wei, Jessica Yeh, Narbeh Dereghishian, Stephanie Stalker, KC Cho, Jackie Black, Will Tang, and Ramon Coronado. We value their commitment and entrepreneurial spirit for social change. They are real changemakers and we believe they are a true example to follow. Everyone can be a changemaker!