HydroPack™ Demonstration Project - Videos

Making a Difference

“You always expect it to be very different and it never is,” says Austen Angell, president of Modern Edge, a Portland, Oregon design firm. “The people are always the same. Every day they want to get up and they hope the day is going to be a little better than it was yesterday. And, overall, they want the world to be a little bit better for their children.”

The main difference Angell found in Mudimbia, Kenya, were the circumstances of the people he interviewed as part of the HydroPack™ demonstration project.

“The difference is that you’re dealing with a community that’s suffering from extreme poverty and the poverty is systemic in that it operates on so many different structural levels,” says Angell.

The design research conducted by Modern Edge explored the packaging and graphics of the HydroPack™ and its use in a disaster situation. Angell learned water collection and usage has changed little over the years.

“We’ve talked to a lot of elders about how life used to be and how life is today,” says Angell. “Everybody of every age agrees that it’s changed dramatically and yet the gender roles and what they’re responsible for hasn’t changed very much at all. Little girls were responsible 50 years ago for carrying water. They’re still responsible.”

This is the fifth in a series of videos on the Kenya project developed by Eastman, Hydration Technology Innovations and Uber-London.