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While improved cookstoves have been designed and distributed for decades with the goal of addressing the human health and environmental issues caused by traditional biomass cooking methods, they often have not achieved the intended impact. One of the main reasons for this shortcoming is that engineers often focus on technical attributes of cookstove designs, such as improved fuel and combustion efficiency, but neglect usability. If a stove design does not meet a cook’s needs and preferences, the stove will likely be used only as a supplement to a traditional stove, or not used at all. To help close this gap, a testing protocol for cookstove usability was developed. The proposed protocol is based on established usability practices from fields such as software and consumer product design, and includes usability criteria taken from existing cookstove research and interviews with subject experts. The protocol includes objective and subjective testing methods, is designed to elicit user perceptions of and the relative importance of each usability criterion in a given context, and incorporates ethnographic methods to improve validity in cross-cultural applications and in diverse testing scenarios. This protocol may be useful to stove designers as a way to better understand users and validate or improve designs, to implementers as a method to assist with the selection of the most appropriate stove for a project, and to researchers as a tool to assess cookstoves and cookstove programs. Preliminary field and laboratory work to test the validity of the protocol demonstrated a mixture of meaningful and uncertain results, indicating that while it is a reasonable tool to assess cookstove usability, the protocol requires interpretation of qualitative data and assessment of uncertainty to be most effective.
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Survey based behavior and impact assessment A case study of improved cookstove adoption in rural Honduras
Nearly 40% of the world’s population relies on inefficient burning of biomass using traditional stoves and open fires for their household energy demands. Use of traditional methods contributes to global anthropogenic climate change, and has been attributed to at least 4 million premature deaths every year. In addition, increasing population in middle- and low- income countries pushes the demand for firewood to unsustainable harvest rates leading to deforestation. To address such challenges, many international organizations have worked to provide improved cookstoves for these communities. This study applies surveys incorporating research methods from social sciences focusing on the role of users to evaluate the impacts of these technologies in the field, as well as to understand what motivates consumers to change their traditional practices. By conducting surveys before and two months after dissemination of 390 improved cookstoves in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, this research evaluated the impact of the improved cookstoves for the users and their evaluations of the presented technology. Results suggest that approximately 85% of the households used the improved cookstove as their primary stove. The top three reasons for households to continue using the stove were reported as reductions in smoke emissions, firewood consumption, and time to cook food. For 80% of the households, the level of effort required to cook with the improved cookstove was reported as significantly less than traditional stove. Future work should include sensor-based monitoring and long-term follow up to verify findings and examine impact over time.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1662485
- PAR ID:
- 10093465
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Global Humanitarian Technical Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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While improved cookstoves have been designed and distributed for decades with the goal of addressing the human health and environmental issues caused by traditional biomass cooking methods, they often have not achieved the intended impact. One of the main reasons for this shortcoming is that engineers often focus on technical attributes of cookstove designs, such as improved fuel and combustion efficiency, but neglect usability. If a stove design does not meet a cook’s needs and preferences, the stove will likely be used only as a supplement to a traditional stove, or not used at all. To help close this gap, a testing protocol for cookstove usability was developed. The proposed protocol is based on established usability practices from fields such as software and consumer product design, and includes usability criteria taken from existing cookstove research and interviews with subject experts. The protocol includes objective and subjective testing methods, is designed to elicit user perceptions of and the relative importance of each usability criterion in a given context, and incorporates ethnographic methods to improve validity in cross-cultural applications and in diverse testing scenarios. This protocol may be useful to stove designers as a way to better understand users and validate or improve designs, to implementers as a method to assist with the selection of the most appropriate stove for a project, and to researchers as a tool to assess cookstoves and cookstove programs. Preliminary field and laboratory work to test the validity of the protocol demonstrated a mixture of meaningful and uncertain results, indicating that while it is a reasonable tool to assess cookstove usability, the protocol requires interpretation of qualitative data and assessment of uncertainty to be most effective.more » « less
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Understanding and integrating a user’s decision-making process into design and implementation strategies for clean energy technologies may lead to higher product adoption rates and ultimately increased impacts, particularly for those products that require a change in habit or behavior. To evaluate the key attributes that formulate a user’s decision-making behavior to adopt a new clean technology, this study presents the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior, a method to quantify the main psychological attributes that make up a user’s intention for health and environmental behaviors. This theory was applied to the study of biomass cookstoves. Surveys in two rural communities in Honduras and Uganda were conducted to evaluate households’ intentions regarding adoption of improved biomass cookstoves. Multiple ordered logistic regressions method presented the most statistically significant results for the collected data of the case studies. Baseline results showed users had a significant positive mindset to replace their traditional practices. In Honduras, users valued smoke reduction more than other attributes and in average the odds for a household with slightly higher attitude toward reducing smoke emissions were 2.1 times greater to use a clean technology than someone who did not value smoke reduction as much. In Uganda, less firewood consumption was the most important attribute and on average the odds for households were 1.9 times more to adopt a clean technology to save fuel than someone who did not value fuelwood saving as much. After two months of using a cookstove, in Honduras, households’ perception of the feasibility of replacing traditional stoves, or perceived behavioral control, slightly decreased suggesting that as users became more familiar with the clean technology they perceived less hindrances to change their traditional habits. Information such as this could be utilized for design of the technologies that require user behavior changes to be effective.more » « less
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