Imagine a portable shower that works with just an electrical socket and a garden hose. The design group TiLT, made up of seven UW architecture graduate students and one alumn, will preview their shower prototype at the Sustainable Ballard Festival this weekend.

Ten recyclable and lightweight polycarbonate panels make up the walls of the shower. Lights in between the inside and outside wall panels will provide privacy and lighting for the shower user, while shining outward too, making it “like a little beacon,” said TiLT member Adrienne Wicks.

TiLT created the shower for the Ballard Homes For All Coalition, which has requested Ballard churches to allow three to four vehicles to camp in their parking lots for four to six months. However, no churches have committed yet.

The coalition hopes to house the shower, which is mounted on top of a trailer, on a lot along with a portable toilet and sink to create a mobile hygiene station, which will “help [the homeless] clean up so they can go get a job, a house or rent some place,” said MaryLee “Glo” Mahar, a coordinator for the coalition.

TiLT was first introduced to Mahar in March when the group hosted the Design Build Challenge, in which design teams worked with various local homeless-advocacy groups. Mahar later asked the team to come up with a design to benefit homeless people.

Sustainable Ballard’s founder and member of the coalition, Vic Opperman, wrote in an e-mail that the hygiene station may be able to serve up to 50 people per day — the same number of homeless car-campers the Coalition estimates live in Ballard.

TiLT, which works pro bono, believes community cooperation and social consciousness have become necessary parts of architecture.

“Everyone is starting to realize it’s no longer going to be a sort of specialty area of architecture,” Wicks said. “I think it’s something we have to do.”

Community involvement is also important to those who live around the potential car camp sites, such as Len and Beth Eisenhood, who live across the street from Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church parking lot.

The church held a tent city in its parking lot from March to April, and is one of the coalition’s potential car camp locations.

“We had a measure of anxiety,” said Len Eisenhood. “There’s a gap, a quantity of unknown.”

After the Eisenhoods heard several tent city residents introduce themselves at a community meeting in the church, they felt better.

Beth Eisenhood started washing and mending clothes for the tenants, and Len Eisenhood said they’d be willing to help again if a car camp were placed at the church.

Several local businesses donated materials to the team, including reclaimed studs, a door from RE Store and leftover supplies from PB Elemental Architecture, including a portable water heater.

TiLT is still working out some issues, like what to do with waste water from the shower ­­— which could be filtered and drained into storm drains — but expects to be finished with the prototype in time for the festival.

Mahar made it clear the shower project isn’t all about the design.

“I’m very happy with these young people. I’m very proud of them,” she said.“It makes me proud to be with them.”

Reach reporter Roselle Kingsbury at news@dailyuw.com.