Role of Industrial Design in the Innovative applications of Solar Photovoltaic Energy for Rural India

This paper communicates study and observations around off grid solar photovoltaic (PV) technology with emphasis on the need and importance of design innovation by intervention of Industrial Design in it. Major focus of this study is on needs of rural India. Currently the use of solar photovoltaic energy in villages is limited to the indoor and street lighting purpose. To improve quality of life of people at the villages and remote areas, it is important to identify the problems and solve them creatively. Industrial design approach to design and develop products to solve rural needs that take care of important aspects like affordability, acceptability, awareness and accessibility by rural population. Consideration of rural ecosystem while designing these products will result in the use of local resources including materials and manpower to develop/manufacture these products to make them sustainable. This will result in new innovative applications of off grid solar PV energy for rural and remote areas of India. This Paper summarises the importance of Solar PV energy in present and future scenario along with the observations about the areas of Rural India where it could be used to solve problems by industrial design approach. It also includes the result of experiment conducted with industrial designers to solve the problems related with the scenario of rural kitchen by providing solar PV hint sheet.


Introduction
For the entire world, Solar could be the largest source of electricity by year 2050 [1] and Solar PV power will be the major contributor of total solar power production.It has potential to provide solutions to the longstanding energy problems being faced by the developing countries like India.Distributed (off grid) solar generation is the opposite of 'centralized generation' wherein the electricity is generated at 'central power plants' that are sometimes located hundreds of miles away from 'load centre' where the customers are located.Centralized generation leads 25 % energy loss in transmission [2] and hence distributed solar energy is an option to prevent this loss.India has enormous potential market for distributed solar energy and ranks first among top twenty potential markets of world [3].Also, it can fulfil energy demand of rural areas of India where there is no or limited access of electricity grid.
As 70% population of our country is living in villages and most of them have lack of access to electricity, Solar PV energy can be effectively used to solve associated problems.Industrial designers can produce innovative solution to the problems by exploring PV technology creatively.As this technology is new to the users and industrial designers as well, it is equally important to find out the problems faced by industrial designers while designing with PV technology.

The importance of Industrial Design
Design engineer is an expert in a restricted number of topics, mainly related to mechanical design, materials and manufacturing, and electronic design [4].The different knowledge and skill portfolios of industrial designers and design engineers are illustrated in Figure 1.This variation in skills and knowledge is reflected in definitions existing within the field of industrial design.For instance, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design defines [4] industrial design as: 'A creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life-cycles.Therefore, design is the crucial factor of innovative humanization of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange.' Figure 1.Difference in skills and knowledge of design engineers(left)and industrial designer (right).[4] These levels of skills and knowledges in various areas, enables industrial designers to solve problems creatively by considering users, manufacturers and the technology.Industrial designers use various methods to generate innovative concepts out of which the sandbox culture is described below.

Sandbox culture for Innovation.
The book 'Design Research through practice' (2011) takes advanced design practice as its starting point, then enriches it to build a design process that can respond to both academic and practical problem.One of the chapters in this book reveals important concept that has pushed design research beyond user studies can be loosely called the "sandbox culture" This is like engineering in Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, or in the hacker culture of silicone valley in the 1970s.One can, as engineers at the University of Toronto, turn a (computer) mouse into a door sensor without going into the physics of sensors.The modus operandi of the most successful design firm in the world over the past two decades, IDEO, has been characterized as "technology brokering": finding problems and solving them by finding answers by exploring technology creatively through engineering imagination, not scientifically [5].
This concept could be used to trigger the innovation in solar photovoltaic product design in rural scenario by introducing industrial designer in the process.To understand the creative interventions to design and develop new kind of Solar PV products, we studied few cases which are already there in market and are described in next section.

Case Studies of Available need driven innovative Solar PV products/systems
Juan J. Rocha invented Solar PV Powered Agricultural Insect Trap [6].This product is a combination of various components to achieve function of insect trap.It has small solar panel which charges the battery and lights the bulb during night to attracts insets toward it.Fan attached at the bottom sucks these insects to trap them in a sac attached with the product.This product is a creative combination of multiple components and exploration of technology.Similarly, a young inventor Richard Turere from Kenya faced the problem of lions attacking their cattle and got the idea of blinking lights to keep lions away from their village.He invented solar powered 'lion lights' an elegant way to protect his family's cattle from lion attacks [7].In this case, he was aware about the basic technology and thought to combine multiple components to solve particular problem.Designers are aware about various concept generation techniques like brainstorming, mood boarding, mind mapping.This approach of creative exploration of technology could direct designers to come up with innovative solutions for rural India by exploring solar PV technology.

Solar Power for Rural India
Nitin Saini and Kumar Krishen in their study of innovative solar power technology systems for rural India (2015) identified the possible intervention of solar photovoltaic energy in the scenario of rural India.Their study describes the development of innovative solar powered systems.They mentioned that the cost and reliability for the supply of these energy sources has been a source of concern throughout rural areas of India.The environmental impact from their use has also surfaced as a major concern.On the other hand, technologies for the direct and indirect uses of solar energy have progressed sufficiently to make this form of energy practical and economical [8].The intelligent and innovative uses of solar energy will render cost effective, reliable, and environmental friendly solutions for rural India.From their observations and experience they identified the needs which are Solar powered community well, Solar powered centralized food preservation facility, Solar powered water wells, Solar lighted streets/corners/Farm ways, Solar powered rural homes/Huts, Solar powered (mobile) tools/implements, Solar power booster for mobile communications, solar powered vehicles, Solar powered waste management systems [8].This study highlights the need and importance of design and innovation of solar photovoltaic products.

Field Visits and observations
As India's majority population lives in villages and in this scenario, there are many problems which can be creatively solved by designers.To identify areas of possible interventions in the daily life of rural people and farmers.We visited two villages Shendi and Sarole Pathar of Maharashtra state.Shendi is located near 11 TMC dam.Our basic objective of this visit was to understand the rural life and problems faced by the rural people in their daily lives.We observed that farmers in this village owns small farm lands.They are farming during specific period of a year and during rest of the year they engage themselves in the activities like construction of roads, dams etc. for income generation.Their living conditions are satisfactory.They live in houses which are constructed from locally available materials and many of these houses don't have electricity connections.These people use conventional farming techniques as they cannot afford high tech equipment like tractors and harvesters.Their daily life is not touched by the technology.The second village Sarole Pathar is a hilly region without any water source nearby.This place is affected by drought.Purpose of this visit was to observe and study solar PV powered water pumping system, installed by a farmer in his own water well.This system was bulky consisting of 40 solar panels to run a 5 horsepower pump.The cost of system was rupees five lacs which is very high for farmers.This farmer could afford this because of provision of grant from NGOs.This pumping system was very efficient without any maintenance and operating cost and every villager wanted to own one but because of the high cost, they could not afford it.From these field visits and observations, we could identify factors of their daily needs, Environmental issues and government policies affecting farmer's life.We decided to focus on their daily needs.We could categorise them into four domains-Agriculture, Education, Healthcare and Daily life activities to help identify the scope for design intervention.
If we look at all these areas, we could figure out various issues that can be resolved through design and innovation interventions by creative exploration of solar PV technology.In our study, we are trying to solve these associated problems by involving Industrial designers.In this process, we aim to identify the problems faced by designers while designing in this scenario.We identified sandbox approach which is used by successful design firms across the world with a focus on a study of available need driven innovative solar PV products/systems.We then introduced a problem brief to a group of industrial designers.The rural kitchen and the domain of cooking was explained as a part of daily life activity (table 1).This study is explained in subsequent sections.

Experiment with Industrial Designers
To know the Industrial Designer's approach and behavior to the problem from rural areas which can be solved by solar PV technology, we conducted one experiment in which the scenario of rural kitchen is shown to the group of four industrial designers and asked them to generate Solar PV powered product/system concepts.From their observations, they generated few concepts out of which the concept of solar powered air blower for cook stove is shown in figure 4. In this case the industrial designers were aware about the scenario and the PV technology from the information provided in the form of hint table showing various components and compatible sizes of solar panels.It helped them to think and generate multiple concepts.Same experiment is conducted with different group of industrial designers without providing hint table.In this case all the designers faced difficulties to generate concepts and ended with non-feasible concepts.This highlights the need of hint table about technology and scenario for the industrial designer while designing solar PV products.

Future work.
First phase of our study involves the problem identification and formulation of problem briefs from the identified intervention areas shown in table1.While in second phase, we will develop various concepts by using Industrial Design methods to solve identified problems.We will install and test developed prototypes to get feedback from users.In this process, the identified problems and methods used will be useful for Industrial designers and Engineers who will be working in this area.

Conclusion
The daily needs of rural population are important to consider while thinking about the improvement of quality of life of them.Solar PV technology is new to users and designers which it is not explored to solve problems of rural areas of India.As Industrial Design deals with creative problem solving by considering all the aspects about users, manufacturers and technology, it can be used to identify and solve the crucial problems by using various design methods and creative exploration of Solar PV technology.If industrial designers are not aware about the actual scenario and PV technology, it is difficult for them to generate feasible concepts which leads their disinclination towards this area.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Field visit observations at Shendi village to study local living conditions.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Field visit observations at Sorole Pathar village to study solar powered water pumping system.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Concept of Solar powered air blower for cook stove.(3D model and exploded view of product concept generated during experiment with Industrial Designers) Nathan S L and Daniel G Nocera 2006 Powering the planet: Chemical challenges in solar energy utilization Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(43) 15729-15735.[2] Martin J 2009 Distributed vs. centralized electricity generation: are we witnessing a change of paradigm.An introduction to distributed generation.

Table 1 :
Areas associated with daily life of rural population which can be focused to solve related problems.(Tabular representation of areas identified from field observations)