Proposal


 * Target Communities:**

Water is essential to life. Not only do we drink water, but we also have many other uses for it such as cooking and cleaning. Therefore, both quality and quantity are very important to our daily lives. However, not everyone in the world has safe and readily available water available to them. In most developing countries, there are “nearly 80% of are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions, and 1 out of every 4 deaths under the age of 5 worldwide is due to a water-related disease. ” (Water Project). One main cause to this is because there is not a lot of water available in these nations, citizens may not necessarily have safe drinking water available and sometimes have to even settle for un-safe (non-filtered and possibility contain harmful chemicals and contaminants. However, the quality of water is not the only issue in developing nations but the availability of water is also a major concern. Especially for “Women in developing countries [who] have to bear most of the burden of hauling water from the source, often many kilometers away, to their homes” (Other 90%). With this identified problem, we have looked at the “Q Drum” project found under the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition for the developing countries. The Q Drum is a useful aid making it much easier for people in developing nations to gather and transport clean water to their homes. Although the Q Drum does transport clean water, it is not necessarily safe for drinking as there are often many hidden chemicals and contaminants in the water. In the following paragraphs we will further explain the solution to this problem. Another issue we are considering is the factor of cost. Since cost of our design is also a key factor determining if it can be easily and successfully implemented into developing nations, we are considering ways we can keep the cost down. One solution we have come up with to this cost issue is to develop and implement a low-cost filter cartridge inside our Q Drum re-design.


 * The Design:**

We are going to use the cylindrical container design of “Q Drum” as the basis of design for our product because we find this design is a clever solution to the difficulty that people often face of hauling heavy loads of water across town. Considering the distance the water is to be carried using this cylindrical container with water rolling around in it we have come up with an idea to add a set of filter cartridges inside the cylindrical container. Making use of the motion of rolling the container back home. As we know, the method of filter is using absorption, sieving, and ion exchanges to remove impurities from the water. Therefore, by making use of the shape of our product, it can keep pushing water through the filter as they are hauling the container back home. Our plan is to essentially keep the shape of the initial Q Drum container but make it slightly larger to allow the container to house our filtration cartridges without sacrificing the initial volume held by the original Q Drum.


 * [[image:http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/images/61.jpg width="300" height="224" caption="Q Drum via Design for the Other 90%"]]

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