Q&A: Fiona Lambe & Aaron Atteridge on getting to know cooks in rural Indian villages

An estimated 2.7 billion people rely on traditional biomass – wood, charcoal, dung and agricultural residues – for cooking and space heating. Roughly one-third of them live in rural India. Fiona Lambe and Aaron Atteridge recently visited women in four villages in Haryana State, in northern India, to learn what they want in a stove, and watch them as they cook.

Q. What prompted you to pursue this project?
FL: We are now seeing a global push to rapidly scale up access to clean stoves. In order to actually get large numbers of people to shift away from the traditional use of biomass for cooking, stove users’ perspectives must be central to the process of developing and delivering improved cookstoves. We had already created a household energy economic analysis methodology and tested it in several African countries. In many ways, this project is meant to complement it; we wanted to better capture the cultural and socioeconomic drivers behind people’s behaviour.

Q. This is part of a bigger project; can you tell us more about it?
FL: The project is funded by Sida under its Partner Driven Cooperation mechanism and is being led by the Department of Applied Environmental Science (ITM) at Stockholm University, which is conducting research on the various sources of black carbon in the Delhi region. Residential biomass burning is thought to be one significant source. The Indian Government is implementing a National Biomass Cookstove Initiative, and we hope to support it by providing useful tools for understanding household behaviour and decision-making in this context.

Q: How did you come to use methods from the product design world?
AA: We had been talking with industrial design companies in Sweden about the whole development paradigm, and why major problems in developing countries remain so difficult to solve despite years of attention and funding: cookstoves, mosquito nets. It became clear to us that too often the “solution” is designed according to purely technical parameters, without any real understanding that, for a technical solution to work, someone actually has to want to use it.

Q. Your methodology is built around ‘generative’ research. What does that mean?
FL: It’s an ethnographic approach used to gather both explicit responses from “users” – that is, what people say – as well as tacit knowledge which is reflected in how people behave. Together these give us a deeper understanding of the most important driving forces motivating their behaviour. We use open-ended, semi-structured interviews, observations, focus groups, and gather audio-visual data.

Q: How did you do your interviews?
AA: Most took place while women were cooking, which meant the conversation was quite relaxed, often led by the cook herself, who could physically demonstrate various stove and fuel attributes. We could also observe her interactions with the stove and ask questions.

It is often useful to use a physical or even imaginary product, to trigger a conversation about certain attributes of a stove or a fuel, for instance – something they wouldn’t necessarily have mentioned if we just asked more functional interview questions.

Q. What are some of the most striking insights that your case study gave you?
FL: One is that there appear to some misconceptions about the use of biomass fuels in rural India, at least in the region we visited. For example, it is often assumed that, given the choice, most households would prefer to use fuelwood rather cow dung. However, for the households who we spoke with, using both fuels in tandem is an important technique for regulating heat during cooking; cow dung produces a slower, “lazier” flame and fuelwood a hotter fire.

Q. What do you think is the most important lesson from your findings so far?
AA: User-focused research and design is an attempt to understand complex human behaviours, so is both challenging and time consuming. However, it is worth the time and investment , and we hope the methods we are developing will become more widely used, by household energy practitioners and policy-makers, so that the design of products intended to reduce environmental degradation and benefit poor people actually make sense to those people intended to buy and use it.

Read the working paper, or a related discussion brief »