Newsletter #4 – March 2021
Hi everyone,
Spring is just around the corner and I for one am ready for it. February was a busy month with lots of preparations being made for manufacturing and lots of exciting opportunities for new partnerships. Notably, we were invited to apply to the Imagine H2O accelerator program. This is the international water industry accelerator, so it's a big honor to have been encouraged by them to apply and a great opportunity for us to create some new content. One of the fun things to come from the application is our new video. Check out the video here to see what we're about and the inspiring technology we are creating. And we will keep our fingers crossed 🤞 during the selection process.
We have been hard at work in the lab for almost nine months now and we are ready to go back into the field to begin testing our next generation, fully manufactured, product. With support from Business Oregon, we have already begun making arrangements with our pilot partners, and I especially want to give a big thanks to My Brother's Farm, where we will be installing our system at multiple residences.
Also this month, the WateReuse Symposium is taking place. It is a great place for us to connect with industry leaders and the people driving change in policy, regulations, and incentives for onsite reuse.
And one other thing I would like to draw your attention to. Over the past few months, we have been publishing articles on our Medium page as a way of sharing information about how we work and what we have known about our industry. After extensive customer discovery, our Head of Product, Nicholas Sund, wrote a series of articles describing the state of onsite water reuse in the US. Dayna Hansberger wrote about Human-Centered Design and how its principles can be applied in creating products people love. This month, I have published an article on Codesign, to share a bit about this design approach to product development and its advantages for rapid innovation and new product adoption.
I look forward to more robin songs and exciting news to share with you next month. Until then, enjoy our new video and this fun introduction to the cutting edge of product design.
- Adam DeHeer
Codesigning Targeted Innovation For Best-Fit Solutions (to Really Big Problems)
Last month, Dayna wrote about the Human-Centered Design approach for social impact. In this month's latest article, Adam shares the story of codesign. Read about the origins of this technique in Norwegian iron and metalworking factories and learn more about the mindsets, methods, and sets of tools that comprise the codesign approach. Read on Medium
LeapFrog Design was invited to apply to the Imagine H2O Accelerator! This introspective application process encouraged us to dig deep into our value and purpose. We're very excited about the opportunity to apply for this accelerator, which supports emerging water technologies. We hope to have good news to share on this topic soon.
As part of the Imagine H2O application, we also created a short video summarizing the problem we're solving and our product. The video is now live on our YouTube.
We use native wetland plants in our ecological water treatment system. This month, we're highlighting the Cattail (Typha latifolia).
Cattails are a perennial plant found across the U.S. in freshwater wetlands. They play a valuable role in the ecosystem, both through their use as nesting sites and providing nutrients to birds and aquatic creatures. Cattails have been used as food, medicine, building materials, and textiles for humans. They can grow 10 feet tall, and can be used as a natural privacy screen in backyards as well as for decoration and flower arrangements!
