H2GLO

785 million people worldwide already lack basic drinking-water services before a disaster ever hits, and 1 in 4 healthcare facilities lack it too. An average of 25.3 million more people are displaced every year by sudden-onset disasters — floods, storms, earthquakes — that cut off power and water in the same stroke.

The deck's framing question: design a system for delivering clean drinking water and evening light to victims of natural and human disasters, for the traumatic period between when the power goes out and when relief trucks show up.

H2GLO is a personal solar-powered water pack: draw water from any source with the attached syringe-style plunger, seal it into the reservoir, and the icon-only interface takes over — no text, so it can't fail for someone who doesn't read the language printed on a label.

The plunger keeps the water intake physically separate from the clean-output spout — a direct answer to a field insight from the design's own research: 'scooping water with the container you drink from contaminates the whole system.'

Water passes through a ceramic filter (turbidity, sediment, bacteria, metals), then a carbon filter (60-plus chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, herbicides, and lithium), then UV light embedded in the silicone shell that kills what the first two stages don't — bacteria, viruses, protozoa.

A solar panel charges the 8800mAh battery in 5–11 hours of sunlight. One full charge runs the UV purification cycle four times, or the LEDs for 22 hours. A check valve by the filters keeps water from escaping back out the top of the pack.

The silicone skin wrapping the pack embeds LEDs behind a pattern of shapes — it absorbs ambient light by day and glows through that same pattern after dark, on the same battery that runs the filtration.

It's not incidental. The brief named light and water as equally load-bearing from the start — and the field confirmed it: one interviewee noted that Lumi lights had 'made a huge difference' for the people they'd worked with in Haiti. Not water-purifier-plus-a-bonus-light; both are the product.

The early objectives — portable, kills bacteria/viruses/protozoa, energy-autonomous, provides light, durable — came out of problem exploration and a competitive scan of LifeStraw, SteriPen, CamelBak, Grayl, and MSR. Two field interviews then tested that concept against real deployment conditions: a Construction Corps officer, and a colleague who'd worked on water projects in Haiti.

The interviews confirmed and sharpened five design decisions, each paired on the page with the field insight behind it: separate the water intake from the output spout, since a reused scoop recontaminates the system; add indicator lights so a user can confirm the purification cycle actually ran; put real distance between the output knob and the spout, since people often have contaminants on their hands; make the filters replaceable instead of the whole unit disposable; and armor the plastic body in a silicone overcover.

Maggie Johnston, Andrew Melissas, and I built H2GLO together. This is it exactly as we submitted it to the European Product Design Award: the problem, the product, the system behind it, and the light.

Before any of that, we worked through the problem itself: who it happens to, what already exists, what the thing had to do, which filtration methods trade off against each other, whether the solar math even worked, and what form it should take. Then we took it to two people who had done disaster relief. That's this book.