How might we make water consumption more visible and tangible, while making water-saving behaviors easier to integrate into everyday life?

And honestly, I had many ideas.

Many of my first ideas were connected directly to the water source: something attached to the shower, the kitchen tap, or the bathroom sink.

But then I thought…

What if it could be something more flexible?

Something that could communicate my water consumption without being attached to only one activity.

And then another thought came to my mind:

What if it felt more like an Alexa?

Not necessarily because you talk to it, but because it becomes an object that lives in your home. Something you actually want to have there.

Not just because it helps you save water.

Please, not another number

During my survey, people mentioned meters, real-time consumption, limits, and feedback. And yes, I think having access to this information is important.

But I kept thinking:

Do I really want another number constantly asking for my attention?

We already have enough numbers around us.

Steps. Calories. Screen time. Notifications. Battery percentages.

So I started separating two things in my mind.

The detailed information could exist in another layer, maybe an app where I could see my consumption by day, week, month, or year, similar to how we track our steps.

But the object itself could be much simpler.

Light. Maybe sound. Maybe an expression.

Something calm.

No alarms. No constant notifications.

Just something in the space that gently tells me:

Hey, pay attention.

Sketching without overthinking

At this point, I decided to stop researching.

Not because there was nothing else to learn, but because I already had enough inputs to start making something.

So I started exploring some ideas through quick sketches.

What if…?

No, maybe…

But what if…?

And then…

Okay. Yes. Let’s go this way.

I kept coming back to the same visual elements: the shape of a water drop, transparency, light, fluidity.

I wanted the object to feel connected to water, but I also wanted it to be something I would actually like to have in my bathroom.

I remembered one response from my survey: someone wanted to reuse shower water, but hated having a bucket there because it looked terrible.

That stayed with me.

What if a water-saving object didn’t feel like an extra object you had to tolerate, but something you actually wanted in your space?

From numbers to ambient feedback

Slowly, the idea became clearer.

When water consumption is low, the object could feel calm.

As consumption increases, its light could change.

And when consumption becomes high, the change could become more noticeable.

Blue → yellow → red.

The expression could change too.

Not to punish the person, but to create a very simple emotional signal.

No need to stop and calculate liters.

No need to constantly check a screen.

The information is simply there.

And maybe, little by little, responding to that signal could become part of the shower routine. Just like turning on the light when we enter a room.

But drawing wasn’t enough

I tried sketching the form, but honestly… it wasn’t flowing.

I wanted curves. Transparency. Something soft and fluid.

So instead of continuing to draw, I started looking at materials.

Paper?

Too rigid.

Plastic?

Maybe, but it didn’t give me the feeling I was looking for.

Then I looked around my kitchen.

And there it was.

Rice paper.

Okay… let’s try that.

I use rice paper in my everyday cooking, but suddenly it became a prototyping material.

It had something I was looking for: transparency, flexibility, layers, and a visual connection with water.

So I wet my hands, experimented with the material, used towels to control the water, folded it, layered it, let it dry, tried again…

And slowly, a little water-like object started to appear.

Not perfect.

But that was exactly the point.

And then, the light

Once I placed light behind the material, things started to make sense.

The layers reflected and diffused the light differently. The object changed depending on the color inside it.

And suddenly I could see the idea I had been thinking about:

Water consumption becoming visible in the space around me.

I experimented with different states:

Blue — low consumption / calm
Yellow — consumption is increasing / pay attention
Red — high consumption / time to reduce

I also added very simple expressions to explore whether the feedback could feel a little more emotional and intuitive, instead of becoming another technical indicator.

So… meet WAVI

And that’s how WAVI came to life.

For now, WAVI is not a finished product, but a first prototype to explore this idea.

The prototype is an ambient light object for the bathroom,
designed to make water consumption visible and tangible,
in order to help people become more aware of their water use without adding extra effort,
by changing its light and expression according to water consumption.

The detailed numbers could still exist somewhere else, maybe in a digital layer.

But WAVI doesn’t ask you to read them.

It just makes something invisible a little harder to ignore.

Some rice paper, a little light… and WAVI was originally published in Living under water stress on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So I did a quick search online. I wasn’t trying to do an exhaustive benchmark. I just wanted to understand what kinds of solutions already exist and what patterns I could find.

After looking at different examples, I quickly grouped them into a few categories:

Reduce -> Measure -> Reuse -> Guide behavior

Something caught my attention. Most of the solutions I found focused on reducing, measuring, or reusing water. Fewer focused on making the behavior itself easier to maintain over time.

And this brought me back to one of my previous questions:

How might we make water-saving behaviors easier to integrate into everyday life, so people can maintain them over time?

But then I had a doubt…

Before thinking about designing anything, I needed to check my own experiment. I had changed several things in my routine and I felt that I was using less water.

But hey… was the difference actually significant? Or was I just doing uncomfortable things that made me feel like I was saving water?

So I decided to measure two of the changes I had made.

First: the shower.

My shower experiment

Before this experiment, I normally used the big shower head. During the challenge, I started using the hand shower and limiting my shower to around two songs, sometimes even a little less. My songs are usually around 3 or 4 minutes each.

I wanted to know if changing the shower head was actually making a difference. I turned on the hand shower for 10.5 seconds and collected the water in a container. Then I tried to do the same with the big shower head.

The test was not completely precise. The big shower head spread the water over a larger area, so some of the water fell outside the container.

Still, the difference was visible:

Hand shower: ~0.25 L collected in 10.5 sec
Big shower head: >0.5 L collected in 10.5 sec

I collected at least twice as much water with the big shower head, even though some of the water wasn’t captured.

And honestly, this made me happy. One of the changes that had been relatively easy for me was actually showing a visible difference.

Then came my real “wow”

I also wanted to look at what was happening when I brushed my teeth.

I had replaced opening the tap several times with using one glass of water.

And I didn’t even need a complicated experiment to notice something:

The glass filled incredibly fast.

That was my real wow moment.

Seeing the water inside a container made the amount suddenly feel different. When water simply runs down the sink, I don’t really see how much is disappearing. But when that same water starts filling a glass, the quantity becomes obvious.

This left me with a very simple observation:

Running water makes consumption invisible.
A visible limit makes consumption tangible.

The measurements were not scientifically precise, but they helped me do something that numbers alone had not done: see my water consumption.

Looking beyond my own experience

At the end of this exploration, I wanted to know if other people had similar experiences.

So I created a short survey. 24 people participated, from 18 to over 65 years old, living in Colombia, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.

One thing became clear: most people were already trying to save water in some way.

They mentioned taking shorter showers, turning off the tap while brushing their teeth, using the small toilet flush, waiting until the washing machine was full, and reusing water.

This made me realize that the problem is not necessarily that people don’t care or don’t know that they should save water.

In many cases, they are already trying.

Making water consumption visible

Something else caught my attention.

When I asked if knowing how much water they were using in real time could help them save more, 14 people said yes, 8 said maybe, and only 2 said no.

So, 22 out of 24 people saw at least some potential in making their water consumption more visible.

Their ideas also reflected this. People mentioned real-time water meters, alerts, consumption limits, shower timers, information about cost, and feedback about how much water they had saved.

One person even suggested something like a Tamagotchi, where saving water would help a virtual character survive.

I loved this idea because it made me think:

Feedback doesn’t necessarily have to be another number on a screen.

Reuse, but make it easier

Another strong pattern was water reuse.

Several people wanted easier ways to collect water from the shower or washing machine and use it again for toilets, cleaning, or plants.

But one response stayed in my mind.

One person wanted to collect the water that runs while the shower is getting warm, but said that having a bucket inside the shower looked terrible.

This small comment connected strongly with my own experience.

A sustainable action can make complete sense, but if it adds effort, discomfort, or doesn’t fit naturally into everyday life, it can be difficult to maintain.

Connecting the dots

At this point, things started to connect.

From my own experiment, I had learned:

Running water makes consumption invisible.
A visible limit makes consumption tangible.

And now, other people were also asking for ways to see, measure, understand, or receive feedback about their water consumption.

So my question started to evolve.

Maybe it is not only about asking:

How can we use less water?

Maybe we should also ask:

How can we make water consumption visible and tangible, without adding more effort to everyday life?

What comes next?

These findings gave me a clearer direction, but not yet a solution.

I started wondering:

What if we didn’t have to constantly check numbers to understand our water consumption?

What if we could actually see it in the space around us?

With these questions in mind, my next step is to explore different ways of making water consumption visible and tangible through light, physical feedback, objects, and digital interactions.

And well… now it’s time to sketch, explore, and prototype.

I was saving water… but how much? was originally published in Living under water stress on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a small diary of what I tried, what felt uncomfortable, and what I started to learn along the way.

One of the first things I did was sit down and review the slides that the teaching team showed us in class. I thought: okay, first I need to really understand what I have to do. So I brought the slides into my Figma documentation and tried to build my own big picture of the project. Doing this always helps me start. It’s like my small first step to organize my ideas and feel that I really understand the challenge.

Then I watched the videos that were shared with us and took some notes. The first one was “My Water Conscious Life in Southern California.” What caught my attention was how he had designed his environment to use water as intelligently as possible. It made me think that maybe one way to approach the problem is to design our systems and environments around a more conscious use of water, instead of only depending on people remembering to save it.

At the same time, I had a question: who can actually have a house like this or build their whole life around using water intelligently? It was inspiring, but it also felt like a solution that is not necessarily accessible to everyone.

The second video, “I Tried Living Without Running Water for 5 Days,” was especially interesting to me because the experiment happened inside a normal home. He tried to understand how much water he was using and tested different ways to reduce it. For example, he stored the water he was going to use in bottles, a practice he knew from Ghana, where he had lived. This was very different from the comfort of having running water in the United States.

In the end, some of the recommendations were very simple: turn off the tap when we are not using water, wash the dishes with as little water as possible, and take a shower only when we really need it.

In the third video, “People Live Without Running Water in Their Home for One Week,” what caught my attention the most was the discomfort of the experiment. Using wet wipes to clean yourself, brushing your teeth with very little water, or washing your hair less often seemed like small changes, but they changed the everyday experience a lot. It also made me think about how, in some places, living with limited access to water is not an experiment: it’s part of everyday life.

After these references, I decided to look at my own routine. I wrote down all the activities where I use water. I literally walked around my apartment while writing them on my computer. Then I changed the color of the post-its for the activities where, because of the time I spent doing them, I thought I was using more water. In this first map, showering and cleaning the house appeared as two important points.

Then I tried to estimate how many liters of water I could be using in each activity. I also created a small journey of my day to understand when I was using more water and become more conscious during those moments.

My first five changes

1. Shorter showers. I decided to try to limit my shower to a maximum of two songs, around 10 minutes.
2. One glass for brushing my teeth. Instead of leaving the tap running, I would try to use only one glass of water.
3. Wash the dishes together. I realized that while cooking, I was washing every plate or utensil just after using it. I decided to wait until I finished cooking and wash everything together.
4. Use the small flush button. I realized that I almost always used the big button because I felt it was the safest way to make sure everything went away. I guess I had this idea that, when it comes to hygiene, more is better.
5. Stop wasting the water I drink. I try to drink around two liters of water every day, but many times, when the water in my bottle got warm, I threw it away, even when there was still a lot left. I decided to finish the water I already had or fill my bottle with less water if I knew I was not going to drink it.

Then came the uncomfortable part…

And here came the interesting part. Yes, I felt that I was using less water, but I also felt a lot of discomfort. Some of these new behaviors made simple, automatic activities require more attention and, sometimes, more time.

For example, before taking a shower, I had to prepare the timer or the songs. Cooking and then washing everything together also meant having a longer task at the end. These were not huge changes, but I started to feel that saving water required me to constantly think about saving water.

Brushing my teeth was probably the clearest example. I put post-its as reminders and I could have my glass full of water ready to use. But boom, without thinking, my hand went directly to the tap and turned it on. It was completely automatic. The same thing happened sometimes while I was cooking.

However, not every change felt like a sacrifice. One of my favorite changes was to stop using conditioner in the shower and start using a leave-in treatment after it. This helped me finish earlier because I didn’t have to wait and rinse the conditioner. And, surprisingly, my hair even felt softer. I loved this change because I was saving water without feeling that I was losing something.

A question started to appear

This difference led me to one of my first important questions: What makes an initially uncomfortable behavior become a normal and sustainable habit?

I decided to do some initial research on behavior change. I wanted to understand how these changes could become easier and how they could make me feel good, like what happened with my hair, instead of always feeling like a restriction.

Yes, I also thought: sometimes, meaningful change requires some discomfort. But hey, how sustainable is that over time?

What I started to realize

Through this experience and my initial research, I started to see a tension:

• Tension: People may want to save water, but that intention does not always become real behavior.
• Why: Sustainable behaviors are harder to maintain when they require constant effort or negatively affect daily life.
• Consequence: Good intentions do not always become sustainable habits over time.

One insight

Saving water shouldn’t feel like a sacrifice.

And this led me to a new question:

How might we make water-saving behaviors easier to integrate into everyday life, so people can maintain them over time?

Now I want to look a little beyond my own experience. I want to understand how other people experience these small changes, what solutions already exist, and what patterns I can find. I also want to make a short survey to hear other experiences.

I already have so many ideas going around in my head, but well… one step at a time.

References
White, K., Habib, R., & Hardisty, D. J. (2019). How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework. Journal of Marketing, 83(3), 22–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919825649

Two songs, one glass of water, and a lot of discomfort was originally published in Living under water stress on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.