A Focus on Refining Coffee Dehydrating Processes
January 2019, MIT DLab IAP Trip

DLab Team Colombia

Emily Zhang
Sandra Walter
Yashna Jhaveri
Maharshi Bhattacharya (Team Lead, Case Writer)

PART I

Four of us, from the MIT D-Lab Development course, had traveled to Colombia during the Independent Activities Period to work with C-Innova, an innovation center based in Bogotá that runs design summits and workshops around the country. In this team, I was a case writer, doing interviews and recording the events of the month-long trip. We were following-up on a design project initiated in the region of Fusagasugá and Filandia at a 2017 International Development Design Summit related to processing coffee, and specifically focused on the drying process.

In Filandia, our task was to understand existing issues in the coffee production process. Typically, based on the notes of the case writer, another team, in the subsequent semester, follows up with proposals for the identified issues, through participatory design and co-creation. However, towards the end of our month-long stay, we realized that we were expected to offer some solutions by way of a prototype.

Through the trip, our host, Gustavo Lopez, a coffee farmer in Filandia, introduced us to many other farmers in the community so as to help us develop an understanding of the scenario, and identify issues that we could assist with. The communities advocated the use of sustainable means to farm coffee, and to that end, refrained from using any fertilizers or fuel driven, mechanized methods of drying coffee, except in dire situations. They also felt strongly about reducing the use of plastic in their techniques. Composting was quite popular with this community.

After these meetings our team was able to identify two salient, recurring concerns:

• The frequent rains in the region made the traditional solar drying process cumbersome and time consuming:

• There was a lack of uniform heating due to temperature drop at night, which caused a delay in production, and sometimes would affect the quality of the produce.

Based on the input from the community and taking from existing methods we put together a proposal with minor modifications and presented it to the community for further feedback.

The feedback provided by the community helped us refine the first proposal to create a test prototype over two days, that the community could use and take observations from, by monitoring conditions and changing materials, in order to ascertain the best conditions for various coffee farms.

The test prototype attempted to address two major issues faced by farmers in the following manner:

• The greenhouse like setup ensures that enough heat is trapped to evaporate the moisture content of the beans, but appropriate ventilation also ensures that overheating does not take place.

• The cover protects the beans from sudden rains.

• The ceramic tiles and the thermal mass below the coffee bean carrying mesh, ensures that during such sudden rains as well as after sundown, the beans receive a continued flow of heat, to minimize temperature fluctuation and settling of moisture.

• The set up is such that on a regular day when the sun is up, both the thermal bed as well as the mesh beds covered by the transparent roof, receive heat and at night the mesh bed and roof are moved over the thermal bed to heat the beans with the heat captured through the day, by the ceramic tiles and the thermal mass.

• The farmers would test with various materials and various opening sizes for ventilation, to find the best arrangement based on the local farm conditions.