bathroom

Ethnographic Research.

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

a study of the behaviour of my target market.

Kitchen (where/how my target market wasted water in their kitchen on a daily basis).

  • Over filling the kettle
  • Filling a whole sink up just to wash 1 item.
  • Tipping cooking water away after use.
  • Not turning off taps properly. Drips amount to a lot.
  • Not using a plug or wash bowl when using the sink to wash dishes by hand.
  • Running a dishwasher when its not full.
  • Washing less than full loads in the washing machine. Typical washing machines use 35-50 gallons per load whether full or not.

Bathroom (where/how my target market wasted water in their bathroom on a daily basis).

  • Running the tap whilst brushing their teeth or having a shave.
  • Showering for long periods of time with the shower on a high pressure setting.
  • Flushing the toilet every time they put paper in it.
  • Using more water than needed whilst having a bath.
  • Using the shower on a high temperature. Quite a lot of the water just evaporates.
  • Not turning off dripping taps.

from these observations I will begin to do existing product research then begin my design process.

Primary research.

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

so to kick off my project I conducted some primary research via the means of questionnaires. The focus behind these questionnaires was to find out how/where/and why people waste water on a day to day basis and to see if there’s any existing incentive to reduce water wastage  . My first questionnaire was 10 Questions long and asked the respondents questions such as ‘do you currently try to reduce your water wastage?’ and ‘specify how you currently do this’. the results from that questionnaire where good however I only had 22 respondents all between the ages of 18-24 and 35-44. from this first questionnaire I found out that large families with water meters installed (you only pay for the water you’ve used) find it difficult to keep an eye on their water usage and wastage. I found out that people would be happy to buy a product that reduces their water wastage as long as its a good price and in the long run saves them money, so there is some incentive to reduce wastage. after collecting the results from that questionnaire I made a new one. in this questionnaire I concentrated on the bathroom and more especially the shower and bath. I had a massive 82 responses which gave me a wide variety of answers. the  main questions:

how many days a week do you shower? the average amount was 7 (once a day)

how long do you spend in the shower? the average amount of time was 10/15 minutes, however some answers where as high as 30mins and as lo as 3mins. (an average 5min shower would usually use 50ltrs of water) so if people have 30min shower they’d be using 200ltrs of water which is equivalent to average daily intake of water  per person in America.

do you ever shower more than once a day? 55% said yes. which is higher than I thought considering I never have two in a day. as a follow up to this question, I asked how many times in a typical week would you shower more than once a day? and the average answer was once or twice. however some people admitted to 7 times ( so they shower twice a day all week, using an average of 1400ltrs of water a week just showering).