Kumulus may be a technical machine, but none of this shows on the outside. “We were engineers, and my biggest fear is to have a product that works well technically but isn’t beautiful,” says Triki, who understood the value of design early on and brought on local designer Zouhair Ben Jannet to turn the prototype into a viable product.

Ben Jannet, whose portfolio skews more architectural than industrial design, drew inspiration from amphoras that were once used by Greeks and Romans to transport anything from wine to olive oil. “When I was a child, people used to put water in clay jars in front of their houses for passersby,” Ben Jannet says. “Its form hasn’t changed for centuries. I tried to modernize [it].”

[Photo: Zouhair Ben Jannet/courtesy Kumulus]

Ben Jannet says that when Triki first approached him, the prototype was a “raw machine” made of metal. “But we’re not made of metal,” he adds. “We need emotions, we need to create a machine to be in harmony with our surroundings, our culture.”Now the device sports round shapes and a futuristic white coating reminiscent of Eve’s glossy body in Wall-E. The current version is made of the same composite plastic material used to make yachts, but at 77 pounds, it’s heavier than the team would like. The final version—the one that those 100 preorders will come in when they ship in October—will be made of injection-molded recycled plastic, which is much lighter, and makes sense to use in larger quantities due to its cost.

[Photo: Zouhair Ben Jannet/courtesy Kumulus]

Triki declined to reveal the cost to the team to develop the product, or how much the machine itself will cost, but he says two units are being rented in Tunisia for $99 per month, including regular maintenance and a filter change every six months. Compared to the cost of water in Tunisia, which is 15 cents per liter, Kumulus will end up costing 8 to 9 cents per liter, Triki says.
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[Photo: Zouhair Ben Jannet/courtesy Kumulus]

Kumulus’s target customers include remote hotels that need a better source of drinking water, construction companies that want off-grid water sources on building sites, and nongovernmental organizations that want to provide access to safe drinking water for the 2 billion people around the world who don’t currently have access to it.The team is working on a smaller model that could fit in the trunk of your car. It would produce considerably less water, about 10 liters per day, but next time you go camping in the Sahara—or the Sonoran desert, for that matter—you could leave your plastic bottle behind.
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