Growkit: Using Technology to Support People Growing Food at Home
Growkit is a project developed at Digital Society School to help people living in the city grow their own food sustainably at home.
This article summarizes a late-breaking work presented at CHI 2019, a conference on Human-Computer Interaction, on Tuesday 7th May 2019.
The current food system feeds 7.3 billion people and very few of them are involved in food production, while more than half live in cities. By 2030 the world population living in cities will rise to 5 billion. This creates a significant challenge in providing global urban populations with sufficient food in a sustainable way making necessary for people to start growing their own food at home. The aim of this project is to create a technological kit that will help citizens in the process and understanding of plants’ growth.
Field research in Community Gardens
To start our research we decided to focus on already successful urban farming initiatives, as community gardens. Community gardens are areas in cities reserved for non-commercial horticulture where people meet each week to work together in all the processes involved in growing food, and then share the produce among members. They have been shown to be successful in motivating people to be more involved in food production and sustainable ways of growing food. Our aim was to take inspiration from these communities to see if we could replicate some elements in a distributed manner, helped by technology.
We scheduled multiple visits to ‘Anna’s Tuin en Ruigte’ at Amsterdam Science Park within the city of Amsterdam where we observed the organization, participated in maintaining the garden, talked to members of the community, and conducted 1-to-1 interviews. The outcomes were used to draw an Empathy Map, the first step to define a brief for our prototype.
Growkit prototype
During the process of gathering information from urban gardening communities, several hardware explorations were conducted. Input from the community was used in each hardware iteration.
The final Growkit prototype design is made of the following components:
The sensors stick
The sensor stick (Catnip Electronics) measures the moisture of the soil, the amount of sunlight the plant receives and the room temperature. The stick sends the measured data to the central unit, where the received data from the sensors are compared to the optimal conditions for that specific species of plant and feedback is given to the users through the central unit.
The central unit
The central unit displays the health of the plants to which each stick is connected to the user through lights. The central unit has a circular shape with three circles. The different circles represent the three different measurements of the plant (i.e. water, light and temperature) through an integrated LED strip. The LEDs light up depending on which measured aspect of the plant needs attention. For the conditions to be optimal, the circles need to be fully lightened.
The app
The app receives all the data from the central unit and gives detailed information to the user about the plant that is being monitored. Each user has a personal profile showing the plants they are growing and the milestones they want to reach. The community of users can interact and encourage each other by celebrating successes and giving advice.
Next steps
The main focus of future work will be on building up the virtual community aspects further. One idea is to integrate data obtained from home growers with data from vertical farming and urban gardens to obtain richer data sets regarding specific plants’ growth conditions. We continue to iterate on the current Growkit hardware as we continue to take inspiration from urban farming communities to build towards more sustainable urban food production.
The Digital Society School is a growing community of learners, creators and designers who create meaningful impact on society and its global digital transformation. Check us out at digitalsocietyschool.org.
