Systemic design applied to water treatment for domestic purposes

Abstract

The paper describes an innovative approach in researching water, developed within a PhD in "Production Systems and Industrial Design" at the Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in "Health Anthropology - Biosphere and health therapies" at the Università degli Studi of Genova. Specifically, the research is stretched according to the systemic design (Bistagnino 2011) methodology applied to water for domestic purposes by considering also the water benefits on human health according to health anthropology and ethnomedicine approaches. The research aims to design an alternative system of water treatment for domestic purposes able to enhance the qualities of water for specific uses by adopting alternative water treatment methodologies able to reduce the amount of water needed, the harmful byproducts production, and the re-use of wastewater. The starting point is the assessment of the complexity of water properties by considering it as an autopoietic system able to generate life and to sustain well being processes. Recently, the understanding of the increasing complexity in the water structure, as a result of the discoveries which have occurred during the last century in physics and biology, made the reductionism view inadequate. The recent hypothesis about water structure according to quantum field theory (Montagnier, Del Giudice et al.) together with studies on its quality by scientists and naturalists (Schauberger, etc.) show us that water has essential properties for life which are not valued at present. Nature generates dynamic and autopoietic systems that improve themselves by maintaining their balance avoiding any kind of waste. According to these innovative theories, the Research Group aims to design an open water system for domestic purposes in which the quality of the input and output water from each process will be enhanced and it will be used as an input for new activities. © 2014 WIT Press.