By Jasmine Burton jasminekburton@gmail.com
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www.jasminekburton.com
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TEDxAtlanta talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pzFVspHIYQ
Prior to graduating from Georgia Tech, Jasmine Burton and her senior design team’s initial SafiChoo toilet design won the 2014 InVenture Prize. Burton then founded Wish for WASH, a startup that houses the development of SafiChoo in the hopes of inspiring the utilization of empathic design principles in the social sector.
BITE-SIZE PROGRESS
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his past year has been a whirlwind as I transitioned from a student designer operating with fantastical budgets and production strategies to a social entrepreneur leading cross-sector design work for use in the developing world. With an amazing team, I design toilets for use and partici-
patory iteration in the developing world through my social startup Wish for WASH, LLC (www.wishforwash. com). Throughout this journey, I have learned that with the constraints of reality also comes the opportunity for incredibly creative problem-solving. As an industrial design student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, my interdisciplinary senior design team created SafiChoo, an inexpensive mobile toilet that won the 2014 Georgia Tech InVenture Prize Competition, the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States. The winnings enabled my original team to pilot the first iteration of the SafiChoo toilet in the Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Norwegian Refugee Council under the auspices of Sanivation. Following the pilot, I founded Wish for WASH, recruited a new team and worked to iterate the design based on feedback we received in the field. Now the SafiChoo 2.0 modular toilet, manufactured as a production prototype in Atlanta and China, will be tested via a beta pilot in Lusaka, Zambia, this year. The 2.0 solution is a sanitary option that is intended to be universally and easily deployed by the customer (such
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as international aid agencies) while simultaneously being culturally specific with a toolbox of options that enable the end user (such as marginalized people in low-resource communities) to choose how to use the toilet to best meet their needs. Specifically, the modular components consist of: n the sit-squat seat, which allows sitting in a traditional manner or the squatting position, which is a common cultural practice in many countries and is an anatomically healthier position for defecating the spacer, which raises the toilet seat to a comfortable sitting height the underground waste collection unit, which can be adapted to existing waste management solutions or used to treat the waste internally via urine diversion or compost a manual bidet, which is still in development, for use by people who practice washing rather than wiping