Strategic Design
2025
Jordan Government
In Jordan, water isn’t just a resource—it’s a currency. It governs our independence, limits our decisions, and shapes our future. As one of the most water-scarce nations in the world, we live with infrastructure that was never built for the realities of permanent scarcity. Every day, homes, schools, and public buildings lose clean water—not because people are careless, but because our systems require them to waste it. It’s built in. Invisible. Post-meter. Normal.
Ask anyone about Birkat Al-Ara’is—once a lush spring in northern Jordan, now cracked and dry after one modest rainy season and an unusually hot spring. It was never a drinking source, but it didn’t have to be. Its disappearance is symbolic: a signal that rainfall, groundwater, and seasonal springs—our traditional water foundations—can no longer be trusted. Not because we weren’t warned. But because our systems don’t respond until it’s too late.
This project starts with the tap—but moves far beyond it.
The Currency of Water: Designing with Scarcity is a strategic design case that proposes a dual-leverage intervention: a device to stop waste before it happens, and a new governance model to make policy move at the pace of risk. By redesigning both the physical infrastructure inside the home and the policy infrastructure inside the state, it creates a system where behavior, institutions, and national strategy finally work in alignment—with scarcity, not against it. This isn’t just about water. It’s about restoring dignity, building resilience, and turning loss into leverage.
Keywords
Water Security
Systems Thinking
Behavioral Infrastructure
Policy Innovation
National Resilience
Governance Reform
Jordan’s water scarcity isn’t a surprise. It’s the predictable outcome of a system that was never designed to handle permanent shortage. For decades, homes, schools, mosques, and public buildings have operated with plumbing logic meant for another era—one where hot water comes from distant rooftop tanks, and users must run the tap until the temperature is right. That wait, repeated daily by millions, quietly wastes billions of liters of treated water each year. The problem? It happens after the meter—invisible to utilities, absent from dashboards, and unaddressed by policy. While governments focus on megaprojects like the National Water Carrier or renegotiating cross-border water agreements, we are leaking water by design inside our own walls. And when infrastructure forces citizens to waste, no awareness campaign can restore trust. Jordan imports more than 50% of its water and faces a drying climate. Yet the contradiction remains: we ask people to conserve while giving them no choice but to waste. This isn’t just a consumption issue. It’s a systems failure.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
