A Scalable Clean Cooking Stove Matching the Cooking Habits of Ghana and Uganda

Abstract

A wide range of Improved Cook Stoves have been developed, designed to maximize efficiency and to minimize emissions. Nevertheless, successful adoption failed in many cases, due to a lack of proper understanding of people's actual needs and instead (too much) focus on technical functionality (efficiency & emissions). The aim of the project described in this paper is to develop a new cook stove for urban households in Africa, which matches with local cooking habits and which at the same time is scalable which means it should match with multiple cooking habits and cooking ecosystems. In order to address both issues, two design approaches were combined: People – Technology Matching (PTM) and Context Variation by Design (CVD). The objective for the PTM part was to map the characteristics of cooking by measuring and observing preparation of the most typical local food dishes. At the same time, in order to overcome the tension between context specific solutions and scalability, we applied the Context Variation by Design (CVD) approach. Via this approach insights from different contexts are intentionally combined early on in the design process to design a stove-architecture that can be adopted in and easily adapted to multiple contexts. For this purpose, PTM research was done in two contexts: Uganda and Ghana. The insights collected from the two contexts were brought together and resulted in a stove architecture that is adaptive to both contexts. The resulting prototype performed well in technical tests. We illustrate and discuss some notable features of the adaptive design in the paper.