More great Designmatters news: The Safe Agua project, which we’ve told you about before, is the focus of an Art Center exhibition at the Cumulus conference, Young Creators for Better City & Better Life,  held in conjunction with the Shanghai World Expo in China. Throughout the conference, panel presentations about the collaboration between Un Techo para mi País (UTPMP) and Art Center will bring together the lead creative team of Safe Agua to discuss how design education can be a catalyst for societal change. (Mariana Amatullo, vice president and director of Designmatters, is tweeting from the event.)

The transdisciplinary Safe Agua team brought together 12 Art Center students from five majors who spent two weeks in Chile last fall to research and visit communities in desperate need of clean water. The team designed six innovative water solutions at a range of scales: a low-cost portable shower, a water purification kit for a 5-gallon bucket, a gravity-fed system to simulate running water, a multipurpose kitchen workstation, a community laundry and gathering space and a campaign and publication for people living in campamentos (“slums”) to share their own inventions. The families from Campamento San José, in preparation for real world implementation, tested prototypes from the class.

“Our ultimate goal is to create one Latin America, without abject poverty, where every family has a decent house and access to opportunities to improve their quality of life,” said Julián Ugarte, director of UTPMP’s Innovation Center. “Our work with Designmatters at Art Center has proven that that such a future is possible.”

Learn more about the program in this Icsid article and at the Safe Agua Chile blog, and be sure to check out the student-made video about the project below: