Project Sammaan was piloting-at-scale initiative that involved the construction of nearly 100 innovative sanitation facilities in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, Orissa (India) and a multi-year quantitative research component to validate the interventions being experimented with, prior to expanding the initiative to other Indian cities, and beyond. It was informed by the year-long research study "The Potty Project" that investigated the experiences of urban slum dwellers with sanitation services, or the lack therof. Project Sammaan was a multi-year public-private partnership initiative that included qualitative and quantitative research organizations, community engagement specialists, architectural firms, solid waste management experts, an the local municipal governments as stakeholders. The initial phase of the project involved engaging with a holistic set of stakeholders (e.g., community leaders and members, government officials, community engagement organizations, etc.) in-context to understand their lived realities in order to inform design principles for the design and development of the facilities. This was complemented by secondary research that helped provide a robust understanding of the myriad aspects of the initiative.

The in-person field research activities for the project were considerable, and spanned the first 18-24 months of the project. These activities included designing and building a scale replica of a toilet block to use as proxy testing for users of differing physical abilities (dubbed the "Potty Lab"), conducting numerous field visits to document and investigate the daily realities of slum dwellers in the host cities (footage of which was used to produce the documentary short "3 Pounds of Rice"), facilitating workshops with internal and external stakeholders to ideate and design facility features, and much more. Field research engagements were conducted in a rolling manner in order to ensure buy-in from the community members and to reinforce that they had an active voice in determining how the facilities were designed, what amenities were featured, how pertinent information was communicated, and even where the facilities were to be constructed.

Insights from the myriad field research activities were distilled into actionable design principles informing four critical pillars of innovation: Facility Design, Operations and Management (O&M) Models, Communication, and Business Models. Disruptive innovations within each pillar were designed in to fundamentally shift both the approach to provisioning community sanitation solutions to India's urban slums, but also the perception of these facilities and services by the local municipalities and the end-users.

Kevin and team carried out the role of day-to-day project management and directed the efforts of the Hardware design teams. This included interfacing with government officials to obtain land and necessary approvals, working with an architectural firm to design the facilities themselves, directing the efforts of a community engagement organization for behavioral change activities, and engaging with a branding and communications firm to develop the identity and signage for the facilities, all while ensuring that activities were predicated on human-centered design principles. Additionally, there was a considerable communications mandate within the grant that Quicksand had ownership of. A dedicated website and blog shared learnings and experiences nearly in real time, a series of films were produced to further share project milestones, the team presented the work at conferences and other forums, and we also engaged with a team from Yale University to document the initiative for use by its business school as an innovation case study.

Despite delays related to numerous challenges within the project, the project team was successful in advocating for design-led interventions in the sanitation space, and in acquiring the land and approvals required for constructing the Sammaan facilities. The team developed multiple design typologies, prepared tender-ready documents, assisted the government with the tendering process, provided inputs into the O&M and business modeling parts, and developed the communication strategy including detailed signage instructions. The initiative replaced nearly half of the existing community sanitation infrastructure in Cuttack, and over 50,000 people in Bhubaneswar now have access to safe and reliable sanitation solutions due to the team's efforts.