It is one of the UK’s largest online classifieds sites where one could buy and sell items, cars, properties, and find or offer jobs in an area, provide services.

Who are the people who would want to buy?
What issues would they would face?
How can urine be sold?

All of these questions pointed towards answering why (the purpose) someone would want to buy it. A spectrum of personas created displayed the varying degree of need and want for urine. But also interestingly stumbled upon the legal issues that could arise in such unmonitored exchange of bodily fluid.

But by going deeper into the technical and medical aspects, we were forgetting that beyond these, trust plays as the key important factor.

The firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something is defined as trust.

The barrier in ease of interaction with bodily fluids publicly was tried and tested with the user embodiment. 2 scenarios where pretend fluid and actual fluid (urine) was carried around in public and the internal shift in emotions were documented right from sourcing, collection and to the exchange.

Collection and exchange being crucial points to document trust, it was enacted out with real liquid (urine) to document the emotional journey that would support us to design for the micro-interactions. The container also had a crucial role to play. The container was covered with few fruits to make it look like a juice container.

I bought a cycle and documented the journey in the form of business origami so that we could overlay the journey of a hypothetical bodily fluid buyer to see where the path digresses from mine.  Contrary to our assumptions the path remained almost the same. So this led us to believe that minor interventions in the existing system could accommodate the new requirements.

The emotional journey and the pain points were captured alongside.

Although the above experiment gave a first hand emotional experience, we thought more situated scenario would give insights on the entire journey of the buyer and seller. We chose two personas among the different use cases to create a rich contrast.

As a eco-friendly substitute for fertilizers.

Any kind of human urine that is freshly sourced and is not contaminated with any pests or virus.

Realised the scale of the quantity, led us to design a system that collects urine from the masses with basic tests.
“Wee Pays” a van with a toilet that would go around the city collecting urine while paying each contributor for their input.

A police officer who has consumed recreational drugs but wants to pass a drug test.

A very clean (free from drugs) urine
Someone who can provide it immediately and with high confidentiality with regards to identity.

This type, although is illegal, provides us information on sensitive areas with higher magnitude.
Looking into this scenario would also help marginalised user, who obtain urine for the purpose of fetishes, achieve their goal without compromising their identity. Enacting the whole scenario helped us be meticulous with each and every micro-interaction.

The first instinct was to check the purity of it as and when it is collected. In the case of WeePays, the sample is tested immediately(00:59) not only to pay the donner accordingly, but also to give feedback on their health. To practically think about the execution of this idea, the cost incurred in collection and maintenance other than the cost to build the infrastructure was unaccounted. On the other hand, drug test scenario(01:10) gave us a much more efficient way of being on the safer side with the bare minimum of using a testing strip provided there is a facility to test it onsite.

Learning from what is available online for the purpose of urine collection, we wanted to design a container that establishes trust. Trust here could be the safety to transport, provision to test, branding, ability to camouflage with other “container”, etc,.

The next stage is to add provision for testing the strip. Opening the container would probably cause discomfort in smell and disgust. This small slot on the side, and on the push of a button could let in a few ml of liquid with which testing could be done discretely.

Designed a self sustaining model where the collection, storage and dispenser is within the same unit.
The parts of the container fitting in like a puzzle pieces when re-arranged would provide a unisex collection facility.
Ergonomically designed to be able to hold it while filling it without any discomfort (both standing and sitting positions).An expandable plastic bag that dispenses from the bottom of the container.

But apart from these there was one other thing me and my team wanted to address. From second-hand research, it was identified that these two users would require fluids at body-temperature. To utilize the existing design to its strengths, we added an additional heating function to the testing strip slot. Inspired from the self-heating pouches from the commercial Chinese food packages, we designed CaO tablets that when inserted through the slot and comes in contact with the urine, it would heat up the urine inside the container through conduction.

Containers, testing strips and heating CaO tablets are proposed to be available commercially of different sizes to accommodate a wide range of users and their purposes.

In order to establish trust, safer exchange points were necessary to identify and establish. Walking around London and trying to feel which places felt safer, we realised that public spaces had these markers that are open secrets. Gen Z would define it as ‘ykiyk’ (you know if you know). These gave us an idea for people to be able to create ‘safe spaces’ by the use of stickers as signs.
This would also boost the user’s confidence that they are at the right place while waiting for the other party to arrive.
Telephone booths, public toilets and covered cycle stands are part of of the streetscape and are predominantly equally geographically distributed. To stand out but also to blend in was a difficult balance that needed to be achieved. So we used the Gumtree logo as stickers, but used a cut-out in the the shape of the logo to stand out from the rest of the stickers (mostly circular or square).

The next challenge was to spread the word around in a discreet manner. Algorithms of social media has their ways to find things that you are interested even if you do not necessarily search for it explicitly. Based on the cookies from the browser history, online purchase and conversations, it pulls up data and feeds you more of it if you engage with it more.

We were looking for a system through which the information could be spread as word of mouth. At first we were looking into reviews and referral links, but those are considered as extra effort without much of reward. So we decided to go with...


Memes.


A fun way to spread the word for the curious eyes to catch the ones that they are seeking. This also meant censoring a few words or using an alternate terms(“Yellow juice” or the logo instead of the word “urine”) to be still under the radar. Hopefully the memes does their job in explaining themselves.

Although we tried to stay unbiased, we failed to look at the user journey from both the buyer and seller perspectives at every step. The idea in the future was to have QR codes  embedded in the sticker to be able to scan on the app in order to verify each party’s arrival to the designated exchange point.
Even though the idea of memes was not well received by a few, I am confident that it speaks well with the target audience (Gen Z).