Hamlet Survallience

Biolite Campstove

1) Overview of the Biolite Campstove

The Biolite campstove was developed through the company Biolite, founded by Jonathan Cedar and Alexander Drummond in 2012, which now sells to over 70 countries worldwide. The stove was predominantly aimed at a market of young outdoor enthusiasts and individual’s new to the outdoors. The stove was developed to address the need of a Cleaner cooking when camping and taking part in outdoor activities, whilst also being able to convert excess heat into energy to charge devices such as phones or ipads. The biolite Campstove uses renewable fuels sources such as sticks and leaves to power the stove, replacing petroleum. The CampStove is 21cm tall, weighs 935.5 grams.

• Impacts on Individuals:

• More reliable doesn't rely on wood being dry
• Cleaner as soot doesn't cover pots and no ashes get into food
• More time efficient as there is no need to gather wood
• The stove does take a long time to charge devices
• The product is fairly heavy to carry around

• Impacts on society

• The CampStove has been used as an emergency tool in previous natural disasters. For instance during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, tables were set up across shops in New York City, offering those without power hot drinks and access to energy.
• BioLite stoves create no smoke as they burn and they also use waste energy in the form heat to generate electricity. This has helped to save lives in developing countries by reducing their exposure to countless toxins from the smoked released during cooking.
• Throughout the creation and introduction of the Biolite camp stove, Biolite has opened its doors to masses of new employees into their factories, working with design, assembly, repairs and further improvements for the future. Therefore, positively impacting the societies where each of their factories are located.
• Biolites compliance with the International workplace agreement, ensures all workers contributing to new and existing products are ensured work for a minimum of two years, as a result creating a stable and sustainable commercial and industrial setting, therefore providing more business and working opportunities for individuals. 

• Impacts on the environment

• The cleaner burning doesn't release smoke containing toxic elements e.g. that from methylated spirits
• The fuel box is suspended above ground on a stand, this means that heat from fire does not sterilize surrounding soil
• The product produces a clean source of energy
• The product produces clean energy[pic 1]

2)Management procedures and roles

There are many roles and people involved within the company to provide order, leadership and control within the company, throughout the design process and throughout the manufacturing and distributing of the Biolite Campstove.

• CEO: The CEO is the head of the executive team, managing the day to day operations of the business, its people and the companies resources. The CEO of Biolite Jonathon Cedar implements the structure and processes to meet the goals of the Biolite company.
• Chairman: The role of the Chairman is to manage and to communicate with the Board of Directors of the Company. The Chairman of Biolite John Levy  is accountable as the key link between the Board and the management of the company.
• Director: The role of the director Matt Christensen is to manage the company’s day-to-day business. His duties with Biolite are completed through organization of its shareholders and dealing with process and people within the company.
• Program managers for each country (India, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya): A program manager is an individual who articulates the goals and objectives of the company through maping out steps that need to be completed to reach the overall goal. The role of these managers in the company is to increase the company’s sales, marketing, and commercial research operations for the revolutionary HomeStove and the CampStove.
• Controller: A company's controller is the heads the accounting department. The controller of Biolite is responsible for Biolites financial statements, general accounting, payroll, budgeting and tax compliance.
• Director of marketing: The role of the director of marketing is to develop and implement brand strategies. Developing marketing strategies for the Biolite Campstove and overseeing the implementation of the marketing strategies. This includes campaigns, digital marketing and events.

3) The design process

There were many steps taken throughout the design process by different individuals to ensure that the Biolite Campstove could be produced to the best standard both functionally and aesthetically.

• Identify need and opportunity: the owners of the company Jonathon and Alec had previously designed products for their company Biolite. They realised they could develop a low-cost biomass cookstove that dramatically reduces emissions while co-generating usable electricity that could be sold and used all around the world, helping fulfil the promise of “Energy Everywhere”, their aim through Biolite. 

• Investigation: The team would have had to research the other similar products that were pre-existing on the market. They would have had to research the technologies they intended on using within the product as well as laws and regulations worldwide that they would have to obey when designing their product.

• Criteria for success: the team before starting with the ideas and refinement process would have set up a functional criteria for success and an aesthetics criteria for success which, to which their product would have to meet for it to be successful.

• Ideas/ possible solutions: throughout this process many designers such as electrical engineers, combustion engineers and industrial designers worked together to design a working product. These designers and engineers would have all worked together to design a product and then create working prototypes to test their technologies and functions within it. Monte and Olev were the teams electrical engineers. They focused on maximizing the electrical power output using the existing HomeStove platform. Venkatesh, Orpheus and Ryan were the teams combustion engineers, researching combustion and power generation systems possible and designing their application in the product. Also on the team was an industrial designer who’s role was to design the product based on a translation from the Biolite HomeStove, making sure the product is able to function will all other aspects being put forward by the engineers.

• Research/ testing: These designers would have had to test the prototypes being developed and research the impacts their technologies and systems would have within the product, on the user and to the manufacturers. Orpheus supported the design and optimization focusing on combustion engineering and power generation from initial research to final design. This encompassed rapid prototype development of parts as well as collaborating with the team to develop procedures for various metrics testing. Another team member Venkatesh supported the efficiency and emissions testing for development.

• Modification/ design development: The designers and engineers involved would have had to  refine the designs of the prototypes to develop a better working product. The industrial engineer Tim, was responsible for the stoves usability refinements, design optimization for manufacturing and 3D CAD construction. As well as this another combustion engineer Ryan, was responsible for design refinements to the combustion and cooling systems on CampStove.

• Realisation: Engineers and designers involved in this part were responsible for the creation and manufacturing of the products. Kurtis the manufacturing engineer, worked on the process development of the stove manufacturing and tooling requirements as well as the quality control testing. He has spent his time on the BioLite team helping implement and manufacture various products including the HomeStove. Also working throughout the realisation process was Erica the communications manger. She is the voice of BioLite instruction manuals and videos and frequently the replier to questions asked on the website and on social media

• Evaluation: Once the design was completed, the product would have been evaluated against the proposed criteria for success. If it did not match up to the criteria, the team would have to re-develop the product until it reached the criteria deeming it successful. After the product was released, the team continued to evaluate by measuring the impact of the product on the target market because they believe “the product is only good if the people use it”.

4) Protection of intellectual property