Human-centred design turned a three-month bathroom build into eight hours. In low-income Buenos Aires suburbs, children who had been missing school started attending consistently.
This project predates SHiFT with Purpose. It is included because it is where the method began; and the principle it demonstrated has shaped every piece of work done since.
When VivE began, the premise was clear: create housing solutions that actually worked for low-income families in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. What was less clear was where to start.
Some traditional market research had given the founders a direction, but not a destination. So they brought in an industrial designer to go deeper. The brief was straightforward: join the interviews already underway, sit in people’s homes, listen, sketch ideas between visits, and bring those sketches back to see what landed.
What emerged across more than twenty interviews was not a housing shortage in the way anyone had expected. Families were sharing bathrooms; sometimes several families to one; in conditions quietly affecting everything: health, daily routines, and children’s schooling. If you do not have reliable access to a functioning bathroom, getting ready for school becomes a daily negotiation. And some mornings, the children lost.
Josefina Crescia & Federico Bustelo
Co-founders, VivE; Vivienda en Etapas
The research involved more than twenty in-home interviews across the Buenos Aires suburbs; not focus groups, not surveys, but sitting in the places people actually lived, watching how they moved through their days, understanding the invisible constraints shaping every decision. Five distinct areas of focus emerged: humidity and mould, water access, hygiene, the financial reality of incremental building, and what it meant to design a home that could grow with a family over time.
When the team stepped back and looked at what was creating the most immediate and compounding pressure, the answer was unambiguous: the bathroom.
The challenge was not simply to design a better bathroom. It was to design one that could actually be built; by families who worked Monday to Saturday, with minimal tools, minimal prior knowledge, minimal time, and minimal money. Conventional approaches were consulted. Architects reviewed the brief. The answer came back: the constraints cannot all be met.
The specialists were not wrong, exactly. They were answering a different question; designing for someone with time, resources, and professional knowledge. Two prototypes were developed and tested. The first took three months to construct. Too slow, too complex.
The team returned to the problem, not the prototype. Everything was rebuilt around what eight hours of a family’s weekend could realistically contain. The second prototype took eight hours to build; same durability, same outcome; built by the people who would use it, in the time they actually had.
What they found was not just a working bathroom. It was what the bathroom had made possible.
“Cata is the most resourceful and creative professional. Her problem solving, empathy and out-of-the-box thinking helped us create a product that had never been created before; even when everyone else said it was impossible.”
Three months later, sitting with the same families in the same homes, the change was visible before anyone said a word. Children who had been negotiating every morning whether they could get ready in time were getting in the shower, cleaning their teeth, and going to school. Not on some days. Consistently.
And something else: the asthma symptoms that had been a persistent background to daily life in several households had gone.
A bathroom.
Eight hours to install. And children who were no longer missing their education because the most fundamental infrastructure of daily life was finally working.
“Cata is the most resourceful and creative professional. Her problem solving, empathy and out-of-the-box thinking helped us create a product that had never been created before; even when everyone else said it was impossible.”
The specialists consulted early in this project were not wrong, exactly. They were answering a different question. They were designing a bathroom for someone with time, resources, and professional knowledge. When you change who you are designing for; when you sit in someone’s home, understand their week, and accept that the solution has to work within their actual life, not a theoretical one; the answer changes entirely.
This is the difference between problem-solving and human-centred design. Problem-solving starts with a solution and works backwards. Human-centred design starts with the person and works outwards. The second prototype took eight hours because the team had spent weeks understanding precisely what those eight hours had to contain.
The question worth sitting with in any organisation: are we designing for the person actually in front of us, or for the person we assumed would be there? The participant completing the intake form. The staff member following the process. The family navigating the first thirty days of a new service. When you change your starting point, the solution changes completely.
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