Cooking Stoves and Cooking Styles: The India Challenge

There is sufficient support to the thesis of sub-cultural nature of cooking and cooking stoves in traditional stoves which makes the task of finding the perfect, one-size, all purpose stove that much more difficult. Bringing home the point once again was a research by Centre for Development Finance (CDF) from the non-profit Chennai-based Institute for Financial Management and Research.

Writing in the India Development Blog, researchers of IFMR point out once again the importance of putting the user at the center of all cook stove solutions.

CDF's Rural Market Insight team conducted a brief field study of cooking practices across 5 states in India. The need for user-centered design is presented in a video report put together by the Rural Market Insight (RMI) team.


User Behavior Insights from Pooja Bhatia on Vimeo.


In order to gain a base level understanding of the challenges associated with cook stove design and adoption, CDF’s Rural Market Insight team conducted a 6-week scan of cooking practices across five states in India to take a fresh look at cooking practices to determine what factors do, and should, influence cook stove design.

According to the IFMR researchers, "despite impressive gains that have been made in improving the emissions performance of stoves and driving their cost down, it seems that many improved cook stoves still do not seamlessly fit into the lives and routines of the user. This is something we have seen time again throughout many of our field visits as well as user experience research we recently completed in an urban context.This can, and has, resulted in less than ideal user adoption of improved cook stoves. Even those using these improved stoves are sometimes using them differently than expected, so that the performance in the field is unlike the results that were concluded in the laboratory."

"With the many advances in technical design and performance of improved cook stoves, we feel it is time to turn our collective attention to user adoption, which necessitates putting the user at the centre of the design process."

Earlier in the year, the team had covered a 6-week long user test of the Leo Double Pot stove from Prakti Design. During this test, CDF deployed a brand new stove and tracked the subject’s use of the stove twice a week for six weeks. Prakti Design, located in Tamil Nadu, India, designs innovative commercial and household biofuel cook stoves.

The researchers found that users not only had different perceptions, they were wilfully subverting the design principles of the stove to meet their particular habits and perceptions.

The research team notes, "From our observation, we identified 3 key elements where user perception differed from our assumptions. For Rani, smoke is supposed to be good and not bad, because she views smoke as a repellant for the mosquitoes living in the nearby waste pile. Leftover ash from the cooking is either used for cleaning vessels or just discarded, so unless there is a big pile of ash inside the chulha, preventing the entry for the firewood, there is no incentive to clean it and thereby improve the efficiency of the stove. Rani insists on using more firewood because for her Prakti Leo stove is taller than a traditional chulha and so you need a bigger fire to reach the pot."


The result was user modifications: "Through frequent follow-ups, we were able to track the evolution of user modifications. First it started by her saying that she didn’t like the metal ‘pot reducer’ ring (which is used to reduce the flame from reaching the pot in the primary burner and enables some heat transfer for the secondary burner). Next Rani placed 3 stones above primary burner to raise pot and let the fire go around the pot. Finally, she purposefully broke the metal pins off of the exhaust plate, and placed that over the primary burner, resulting in flames exiting the primary burner, but making the secondary burner useless.
Potential reasons for modification could be that the user is used to cooking on a single-burner chulha and didn’t understand the thermodynamics of the stove."