Sustainable water scenario. Designing sustainable water distribution product-service system for all

It is nowadays clear to all those key issues to be faced since now and for the decades to come are the sustainable development goals, among which access to “clean water and sanitation”. Most births are expected to happen in low-income contexts where they have neither the technology nor sufficient wealth to purchase. The proportion of the world’s water is always the same, water resources are finite, and most are contaminated by human activities. The design research process of this thesis started with desk research on water security problems as well as proposed strategies and solutions. A second step has been a best practices analysis of sustainable water access, with a focus on those cases proposing a Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS) approach applied to small scale, locally-based water systems where main activities are under the control of local communities, so-called Distributed Water (DW) systems. An Exploring Opportunities phase followed with a set of idea generation workshops addressing sustainable water access as S.PSS applied to DW, coherently with an EU Erasmus+ project coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and involving a large worldwide scientific community from the low and middle-income context from all of the continents (many researchers from 36 universities partners). The ideas are then clustered to better identify the most meaningful polarity diagram capable of generating the most coherent, promising and communicative narration of a possible scenario. More precisely an SDOS is designed as a polarity diagram drawing four visions presenting each of them a sociotechnical set of sustainable win-win opportunities. Each of the for visions (in all being the scenario) is described by a title, a short description, as well as by a peculiar storyboard, though particular embedding all of the characteristics of the vision it aims at introducing. Each of the vision is as well described by the cluster of ideas and the single ideas, as well by the case studies belonging to it. The polarity emerged are…and the for visions identified by them are …This thesis is framed within LeNSin project (International learning Network of Networks on Sustainability), funded by the EU Erasmus+ project The Design-Orienting Scenario on Distributed Water is an open access designed narration available on the LeNS international network platform, for this reason, free to be download commented and amended, and hopefully even used as an inspiration to designer engaged in design for sustainability with a focus on sustainable water access to all.