Our research in cooking stoves issues was initiated in 2003 by World Wildlife Fund for nature (WWF) Finland as a collaborative project with the Product and Strategic Design Department of University of Art and Design in Helsinki. The project research was a collective effort by 5 international students, Heidi (Norway), Dan (Romania), Duncan (UK), Terro (Finland), Rok (Slovenia) and supervised by Simo Puintila (Finland). Our proposal consisted of diverse ideas for field interventions all related to the issues of cooking stoves using biomass briquettes made locally from bio-waste material.

In January, 2004, Heidi, Duncan and me were sponsored to seed our ideas in Chembe, Malawi, where the initiative pilot project already started by WWF in 2001.