Biolite Inc., HomeStove Case Study Thank you to Ryan Gist and the rest of the Biolite team for generously sharing their work and insights for this case study. -- Prof. Susan McCahan, November 15, 2017 This case study The Biolite HomeStove case study demonstrates the concept of “embodiment”, which means taking an existing design or design idea and reformulating the design to meet the needs of a different set of users. See the text for more on this concept. In this instance, Biolite Inc. had a camping stove product they had designed, patented, and which they were marketing. They decided to use this existing technology to create a domestic cooking stove for a different user group: people who daily use wood-fueled fires for cooking. What follows is a set of screen shots from design documents provided by the company. They have also provided some commentary on their design process. It is not a complete set of material or a perfectly compiled set of material. Instead, it represents snapshots of the activities in a real engineering design project. In addition to reading this material, please have a look at their website to better understand the company, their mission, and their work. https://www.bioliteenergy.com/pages/our-story Understanding the need What are a couple of the strategies or methods that the company used to develop an understanding of the need? Was this a “push” situation where the technology was invented first and then you went looking for an application? Or a “pull” based on an identified customer need? From Biolite: This is an interesting one, because to a small degree it was a “push” exercise. The core concept of clean-burning, efficient woodstove that generates its own electricity was originally conceived to solve a camping/backpacking problem. The core concept was then “ported” (or re-purposed, or applied to) the parallel problem of indoor air pollution and lack of electricity access in the developing world. We of course had to go through a typical process of identifying all the customer needs, wants, and pain points – but this is also a good example of applying known technologies in a new combination in order to achieve a better solution. In order to understand the need, we had the benefit of a team member who had just done an extensive (PHD thesis) amount of research on failed attempts to address the root issue. He was able to put together an understanding of how and why previous attempts had gone wrong so he was well-equiped to help us understand what had the best chance of success. Beyond his research the bulk of our understanding of the need was based on spending time with the customer observing and experiencing daily life and the common factors that led to the problem. Below is an excerpt from the patent that protects the intellectual property for the Biolite camp stove. The guts of this technology was used as a starting point for the HomeStove concept, as described above. The full text of the patent is available at the U.S. Patent database website. Click on “images” to get the page view: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=5&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=biolite.ASNM.&OS=AN/biolite&RS=AN/biolite
The problem This is the way the company states “the problem” on their website. Note how this expression of the problem does not explicitly state the primary functions of the system, but implies them. This is directly from my contact at Biolite. It was in an email, so the language is less formal: The problem was formulated at a couple different levels, which I’m not sure is a practiced approach but worked well here. The broadest problem statement was: People are dying at a rate of nearly 4M per year due to indoor air pollution in their homes. The pollution comes from the smoky fires the use for everyday cooking. These people do not have access to clean cooking methods like natural gas or electric stoves – in fact they do not have access to electricity at all. This problem formulation was very simple to understand and communicate – our CEO told everyone he talked to, and every employee at the company could recite it in the elevator. Beyond this broad statement, the product development team had some more specific aspects of the problem they were considering: Most of the people experiencing this problem only have access to biomass fuel (wood, crop waste, tree bark, etc. Most of these people also burned kerosene or paraffin lamps to light their homes, which also contributes to indoor air pollution Most of these people do not have reliable access to electricity, or no electricity at all. Most of these people own at least one cell phone in the family but have to pay someone in a nearby village to charge it for them
Understanding the user group What follows are several pages and snippets from a customer research report. Some of the formatting is a little different than the original report because it has been copied over to this document, but I tried to get it as close as possible to the original. This was one of several methods the Biolite team used to gather customer information. In this particular instance they had developed a prototype based on their camp stove design and took the prototype out to test with users. You will note that some of the values in the report have been redacted (i.e. xxxx substituted for a number). This indicates a piece of information that Biolite does not want to share. I have not included the whole report here, which is quite long. Interesting things to note in this example: There is a concern that pricing the stove too low is a problem (see Willingness to Pay on page 3). This has become a common piece of knowledge in movements such as “design for the next billion” and “design for the other 90%” which are design movements aimed at providing high quality technology solutions for the next billion people who could potentially benefit from the technology you are designing. If a technology is priced too low, it conveys a sense of cheapness and low quality to the potential user. People are generally more likely to use technology that conveys a sense of quality and status, rather than technology that suggests inferior quality. This is related to experience design. The description of the people testing the technology is narrative in nature. That is, the report does not read like a standard lab report, but it is also not simply a story. The people who are partnering with the Biolite team to test the stove are described in some detail and in a way that respects who they are and what they do. This is an important element of “participatory design” which brings community members into the design process as part of the process. And the report also includes measurements and analysis of fuel usage, etc. that inform the design process. There is a recognition that different applications will provide different pieces of information. By testing the stove in home and restaurant use, and in several different locations, the team is able to uncover important similarities and difference across a broad set of users and service environments.
