Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.

• Project Name: Clean Team
• Designers: IDEO.org + Unilever and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)

Clean Team is an affordable in-home sanitation system in Ghana that offers residents an alternative to unsanitary public latrines. Essentially, a portable toilet is delivered to customer homes and serviced three times a week. Families pay on an incremental basis.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Clean Team was notified that we had been recognized for the Core77 Design Awards from IDEO.org's marketing and communications team.

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

Clean Team is rapidly scaling in Kumasi since the end of the pilot, with another 120 new Clean Team toilets installed just in the past month of July. The business has recently received a shipment of 1,000 new toilets and plans to have at least 1,000 total installed in homes by the end of the year, reaching out and providing improved sanitation solutions to over 7,000 Ghanaians. With scale, Clean Team is proud to maintain a positive customer experience. In the words of one of our clients: "Clean Team is hygienic, ensures privacy, safe and has provided me something to be boastful about as these days it is the only predictable and dependable service I get."

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When it came for prototyping, the IDEO.org design team arrived in Kumasi to test four toilet prototypes. Industrial designer, Danny Alexander, explains that "one of our concepts going into prototyping was a water flush toilet, similar to a high-end camping toilet. It had been the clear favorite in the drawings we shared earlier in the process. When we brought prototypes to the field, though, we realized very quickly that water flush toilets would do more harm than good."

After leaving water-flush and non-flush toilet prototypes in user's homes for a few nights, the team returned to check on the toilets. "All the water-flush toilets had overflowed--what a disaster!" Between that, the complexity of use, the lower capacity of the tank, and the need to use expensive water to flush their waste, users of water-flush toilets unanimously rejected them. Everyone wanted the simplicity of non-flush toilets. Had we not physically tested the toilet prototypes with users, though, we would have thought water-flush toilets were the answer!

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

During the design process, WSUP, Unilever, and IDEO.org were driven by the fundamental belief that every family deserves a toilet. This project was as much about providing dignity as it was about providing clean sanitation for our clients. So one of our biggest a-ha moments came when thinking about our branding and business design strategy. Seeing as our product provided dignity for families, our brand had to follow suit. For this reason, Clean Team's business design was heavily structured around the strength of its service—following through with promises in a professional manner and making people the cornerstone of the design. To achieve this, we found that an important part of business development would entail Clean Team making an often stigmatized and undesirable job into an esteemed profession.

View the full project here.

Project Name: Wheelchair for children in Guatemala Designers: Design without Borders

In partnership with the Guatemalan foundation Transiciones Design without Borders developed a pediatric wheelchair customized to the needs of children in Guatemala. Transiciones, who manufacturers low cost wheelchairs for marginalized groups, lacked a wheelchair targeted towards children in its product range.

The needs of a Guatemalan user and the local challenges connected to poor infrastructure, availability of materials, production facilities, costs and ergonomics were taken into the design process. The project aimed at transfering knowledge about design methodology, to enable the highly skilled technicians at Transiciones to customise wheelchairs more efficiently and continue to design new models.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

We actually followed the online, live announcement.

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

Currently the pediatric chairs are in production by our project partner Transitions Foundation. The collaboration with Transitions Foundation was from the beginning planned to be only for a limited time period, with the objective of transferring design skills to Transitions staff through the process of co-designing a wheelchair. As the wheelchair now is in production, Design without Borders is no longer involved in the project. Transitions has been an amazing project partner, and the collaboration was a truly positive one, with an enormous amount of enthusiasm and interest to test out and learn more about design thinking. Transitions Foundation is currently manufacturing the wheelchairs, and for a donation of 450 USD you can sponsor a pediatric wheelchair that is customized to fit the requirements of the individual child in need of a chair in Guatemala. Check it out here.

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

The staff at Transitions are excellent problem solvers, and well used to customize their wheelchairs to each individual patients needs. But they lacked the tools to develop and communicate the good ideas and solutions in an efficient way. One of the skills they needed to learn was technical drawing. One of the designers came up with the idea to combine fun and learning, and brought a bunch of legos. The lego was built in different shapes, and used as a tool for technical drawing - to learn to see three dimensions from a flat paper. The lego was of course also used for fun & play as most of the staff never had played with lego before, but also for testing of different wheelchair concepts.

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

Towards the last part of the project, Design without Borders launched a competition, challenging the staff at Transitions to independently design accessories for the pediatric chair. The only condition was that they follow all the steps of an ordinary design process. The competition was juried by professors at the Universidad Landívar in Guatemala City, and the participants had to defend their concept. Realizing how much of the design thinking, the staff at Transitions had acquired and how independent they were in their design approaches, was one of those aha-moments—maybe more for the staff at Transitions than for the designers. Many of the accessories designed for the competition are today in production.

Another aha-moment was when the staff at Transitions saw all the ideas and sketches they had brought forward for the pediatric chair organized in to different concepts and 3D drawings by the designers. Suddenly they realized that they are the owners of the ideas, designs and project. That the sketches and ideas they were coming up with not just were for training and input, but actually part of the chair that was in the process of being designed.

View the full project here.

• Project Name: Kulinda
• Designer: Emily Riggs
• Brunel University

Kulinda is designed to prevent transmission of HIV through breastfeeding in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a simple, clear, binary indicator which works in conjunction with a process called Flash Heating to show when HIV has been deactivated in breast milk. This enables HIV positive mothers with limited resources in sub-Saharan Africa to accurately treat their breast milk before feeding to their babies, providing them with food and nutrients in a safe, economical way. Each device costs 20p and can be provided with a pictorial instruction booklet, bag and container.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

I was doing some freelance work and am e-mail came up on my screen saying that I was one of the award winners, very exciting and not much work got done for the couple of hours after!

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

I am developing the project at the moment and have also made the project a website.

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

Just before submission of the project someone mentioned that my project may be suitable for the 4th International Conference for Universal Design in Fukuoka. I filled in an application and sent it off and was lucky enough to be selected as one of the speakers! Brunel University were incredibly supportive and funded the trip which turned out to be a amazing experience.

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

The most "a-ha" moment was probably before the project properly began! I was on a bus going across Nepal with a friend Kat who is doing her PhD in HIV research and we were discussing ways of HIV transmission. She mentioned that it could be transmitted through breastfeeding and I suddenly thought that it was something that I wanted to work on prevention of!

View the full project here.