Kohn, Joel L.

Description

This project addresses the sustainable design challenge of bacterial contamination of water through a product system that makes collecting data, sharing data, and retrieving data simple, fun, and potentially profitable. This product system grew from the author’s volunteer experience monitoring bacterial contamination of water. Water connects people, prosperity, and planet, all three major aspects of sustainability. There are variety of methods to monitor water/ecosystem quality and methods that test water chemistry, the author chose bacteria because of his familiarity with the method, the ease by which the method can be applied by the general public, and his access to sampling supplies through his volunteer work. The product idea was the author’s, and it grew through a systems mapping approach, helping to identify connections and delays in the system, and led to a product idea that won a development team in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Global Design Challenge course. The WaterSlide team—Craig Johnson, Jessica Papa, and the author—applied the Lean Startup Method to discover a business model largely based on customer feedback through interviews. The initial product idea was hardware that could remotely monitor bacteria levels in a body of water. Results form this first phase of interviews, study of the Blank and Dorf text, and lessons learned from the Business Model Canvas led the WaterSlide team to pivot away from a hardware unit and toward a software and data product system to address the design challenge, largely due to invention risk. After pivoting, the team focused on a mobile application (app) to reduce or eliminate delays in the data reporting process. Through interviews and the Business Model Canvas, the team found that selling data to governmental/regulatory agencies was a possible source of revenue. After completing a total of 57 potential customer interviews, the team shifted into prototype creation, making a wireframe mockup of the product, a slide presentation, and a promotional video. The prototype started with a list of functions that the app should perform, from which flowed the initial mockup sketches. The team further refined these sketches and determined that the data reported should include site and plated sample photographs with metadata documenting site conditions and sample results. The team determined that WaterSlide would own the data and house a centralized database with free, public access to current information and with large blocks of data suitable for scientific or regulatory analysis available at a cost. Initially the costs of operating the WaterSlide model would be provided by outside sources: grants, investors, etc., until the database is large enough to generate income from data customers. Discovering a business model for a multi-sided market was challenging for the WaterSlide team. In particular it was difficult to gain interviews with large-scale data customers. Practically, it was also challenging to lead a group across several time zones while working and going to school full-time. The team sought grant funding to further develop the idea. While the team did not win that grant, the author recommends implementing the model to create a sustainable business. A sustainable human world is one in which humans and their economic systems have been reintegrated into the laws and workings of the planet on which they live. This project was an attempt to create a digital and eventual physical product system tied to water quality. Water underlies all three of those pillars of sustainability and is essential to life on earth. By creating a platform to observe and share water quality information, the WaterSlide system connects people to planet with generating profit as a goal.