Brief: FRANK Water asked us to create a collection of portable drinking water stations. This was to enable them to offer free water refills as part of their Festival Refill Service, whilst educating the UK festival population on the importance of having access to clean drinking water across the world.
Who: FRANK Water– A Bristol-based charity funding clean drinking water in India and Nepal
When: May- September 2019
Where: Travelling around 15 UK festivals including Love saves The Day, 2000 Trees, Cornbury and Camp Bestival
What we did: Team Tarren worked intensively over 6 weeks to create these portable stations and were responsible for designing, creating and touring the kiosks.
Our key aim for this project was to be as sustainable as possible. To do this we repurposed some of our existing steel frame structures to create the stations. Doing this means that they are incredibly robust and therefore suitable for their new life on the road and in festival fields for years to come. Where wood was used we sourced Ecoply which is made out of reclaimed materials, and all plastics used were recycled.
We did a lot of research into FRANK Water’s work, and painted the interiors of the pods with a concrete effect to emulate one of the many safe drinking stations that they have provided in the 442 international communities they work in.
Tarren stored the kiosks when they were not in use at festivals, and organised the logistics of delivery and setup at each event, also being on hand to make any adjustments that were needed.
Challenges: One of the biggest challenges with this project was ensuring that the water pods were robust enough to deal with festival life, but light enough to be moved with nothing more than a forklift when on festival sites or when being moved off trailers. We also had to make sure that the pods could be left securely overnight, but that they were easy to open and close each day by the FRANK Water volunteers.