The Aquaduct is a mobile filtration vehicle, in other words, it’s a bike with built-in water tanks and a water filter. When you ride this bike, some of your pedaling power goes towards pumping the water through a filter.

I think it’s a interesting and cool design. But I heard a talk from a guy today who makes water purification devices for developing nations and he thinks it’s completely impractical. The bike would be quite expensive along with the filters, which would need replacement. In fact, there are much cheaper to purify water such as using UV light or chemicals. These methods are also reasonably fast.

But nevertheless, it’s a elegant design. It won the grand prize for the Innovate or Die design competition. I’m interested in question of why this design is elegant. (Hopefully in your work, you’ll create designs that are both elegant and practical).

Let’s say that the designers of this bike went out into the field and observed people retrieving water. A hypothetical task analysis would run like this:

Leave house with water bucket->go to water source->retrieve water->go back home.

They knew that they wanted to add water filtration to this set of steps. But what’s makes this design interesting is that they didn’t add an extra step. Adding an extra step is a hassle for people. They’ll be less likely to adopt the practice. Instead what the designers did was they piggybacked water filtration on the “go back home” task. And that’s why this design is a winner.

So, what other designs can you think of that introduced a new practice that piggybacks on an exisiting task?