PUB Splash Lab winners create water conservation campaigns with droplets of creativity

How easy can saving water be? Let the PUB Splash Lab winners teach us some life hacks to conserve water in our own homes.

For these students, saving water could be as easy as keeping your shower time to as long as three songs on Spotify.

The Easier Than team, comprising six communications and media management students from Temasek Polytechnic, created a social campaign to promote water conservation by comparing the amount of water youths typically use with relatable examples.

20-year-old student Evyn Toh from Easier Than shared: “We realised that a lot of youths don’t think about how wasting water can impact their daily life.

“We’re shared with them micro-level examples of how they are wasting water, together with easy ways to incorporate saving water in their lifestyles.”

Another team member from Easier Than, 21-year-old Clemens Choy, added: “For example, if you spend 20 minutes in the shower, you’re actually using a few months’ worth of Spotify subscription.

“It’s something very relatable to youths to get them to save water.”

The social campaign, which stood out with its bright colours and casual language, won them first place in the ‘Social Movement’ category in PUB Splash Lab, a competition that encourages students from Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) to generate interest towards water conservation among youths.

Team Ez-Cleanse, another winning team from Nanyang Polytechnic, was inspired to create their water saving prototype based on their personal experiences showering their pets.

“As a pet owner myself, I didn’t actually think of asking myself if I conserved water while showering my pet,” added 19-year-old engineering student Niko Hong, whose team won first place in the ‘Product Prototype’ category.

While their prototype is targeted at pet owners, the team decided to include LED lights and a buzzer to cater to visually- and hearing-impaired users.

“The showerhead contains a valve for users to control the water pressure. The buzzer will sound when it reaches the maximum amount of water used. This function might help visually impaired users,” said 19-year-old engineering student Irdina.

Working on these projects proved to be quite a challenge for both teams. The Easier Than team recalled their struggles creating their website from scratch – and filming videos during the monsoon season.

“Our second shoot was scheduled outdoors, and we had no choice but to film it in the rain!” recounted 20-year-old Anne Tan.

Meanwhile, Team Ez-Cleanse had to juggle the project with their final end-of-semester assignments and submissions.

“During the project period, we had our semester examinations too. Time constraint was the biggest difficulty we faced because there were so many things that we wanted to implement,” recalled Irdina.

Easier Than attributed their winning factors to their unique audience engagement methods and clear campaign messages.

For their marketing strategy, they posted different polls and challenges on their Instagram page to interact with their audience and show them how easy saving water could be.

“We took suggestions from our followers about crazy ways to save water and created user-generated challenge videos. I think people enjoyed the content because they found it funny,” said 20-year-old Kristelynn Lim.

Toh Evyn, 21, added: “We kept to these messages, ‘Saving water is easy and convenient, and that water is precious’, throughout our entire campaign.”

On the other hand, Ez-Cleanse attributed their win to their teamwork.

“Besides being able to work with my teammates, it was a really great experience as we picked up a lot of skills and knowledge while doing extensive research,” said Niko.

While both teams have completed their projects, they hope that their audience would continue to think about saving water in their daily lives.

“We hope that many other individuals will be able to share their ideas and create or implement devices for water services, such as water taps, so that we can help to save water,” said Irdina.

Similarly, Clemens hopes that more youths will include water conservation in their efforts to be environmentally friendly.

“Nowadays, water isn’t something we think about when it comes to environmental conservation. We always think about pollution and plastic waste, but we don’t really think about water.

“Even if we’re unable to convert youths to save water [through our campaign], at least they know the value of water now.”