Projects & Research

Martha Merson, Nickolay Hristov, Betsy Towns

Project Staff
Elise Levin-Güracar

Participating Researchers
Jolie Gutentag, Shawn Shafner

This project lays the groundwork for community conversations about the design and deployment of strategies for alternative solutions to human waste, particularly those that have the potential to mitigate impacts of climate change.

Functional flush toilets in the US are the norm, however, increasingly frequent and intense storms create problems with sewage and waste treatment. The number of people affected by these problems will increase. Even now evacuees from climate disasters, rural residents, as well as trans community members all struggle daily with safe options for everyday bathroom use and stand to benefit from adoption of new systems and approaches.

In this research planning phase, an interdisciplinary team of artists, designers, public servants, and STEM educators will open discussions of alternative solutions for managing waste and mitigating flooding impacts. Alternatives may become intriguing, palatable, and even desirable to our neighbors. Our goal is to pilot a survey and facilitated conversations that engage participants in designing approaches to manage humanure, an intensely intimate, stigmatized, “ick” part of life. The team will recruit recreational enthusiasts, representing North Carolina’s diversity of Latinx families, Black faith leaders and their congregations, and LGBTQIA undergraduates to participate. During facilitated conversations of mixed audiences, project leaders will:

• Consult with and engage diverse NC residents to identify priorities, values, areas of curiosity, and preferences.
• Lay the groundwork for a market segmentation study that solicits responses from a wide range of folks clarifying opportunities and challenges to adoption of alternative solutions.

When new solutions become available, pushback can derail adoption. Without significant efforts on the front end to design deployment strategies, innovative, alternative solutions that mitigate a range of climate change impacts will face resistance and fail to be widely adopted. Findings will be relevant to municipal planners who need public buy-in to manage change.

The NSF ReDDDoT program is a collaboration with philanthropic partners and crosses all disciplines of science and engineering. The program seeks to ensure ethical, legal, community, and societal considerations are embedded in the lifecycle of technology’s creation and use. The program supports research, implementation and education projects involving multi-sector teams that focus on the responsible design, development or deployment of technologies.