Horizontal farming is so 2017…

The Service/Product should connect and help people to grow food at home in a fun and easy way, by providing easy to use technology, to share knowledge and experience and monitor their plants.

So what were our goals for sprint 2?

• Build a prototype which communicates the plants needs to the user.
• Play with technology (sensors) to get a potential solution
• Explore gamification as a tool for user experience
• Test the prototype with potential users and get their feedback

Let the brainstorm begin🌪️

In order to reach our goals within 2,5 weeks, we started brainstorming and ideating right away. We combined two methods: Lotus blossom and Morphological chart. That might sounds a little odd, but it worked out very well for us.

This is what it looked like after writing down and drawing our ideas

But we realised focussing on all five requirements during one sprint was maybe a little too ambitious. That’s why we used the MoSCoW Method (Design Method Toolkit) to figure out which requirements are most important to us during this sprint. We categorised all our ideas, slightly different and more detailed from our requirements, and set up primary, secondary and tertiary goals for sprint 2. We prioritised the categories based on the results of our user research during sprint 1, our client’s wishes and our own gut.

Primary, secondary and tertiary goals.

Prototype party!

After prioritising, we started our ideation process. We all took an hour to sit somewhere and draw out what we have in mind as a first prototype. After discussing and combining our ideas, it was time to START PROTOTYPING 💃🕺

The final concept we wanted to prototype during this sprint was a ‘smart ring’. This is a ring the user can put around their pot, containing a sensor for soil temperature, soil moisture, air temperature and light intensity. The data coming from these sensors will then be sent to an app, where the data will be visualised for the user.

Dowels can be placed in the ring and another element can be placed on top, which makes the product stackable. This way one can grow more plants in one place, vertically. On the bottom of this stackable part, LED lights will be there to light up the plant. This way the user doesn’t have to place their pots next to the window and the plant can still grow without sunlight. This might all sound vague, so here’s the 3D model.

Afterwards, we 3D printed these models! This is what it looks like in real life:

But the smart ring and this stacking structure is only part of our prototype. To translate the data that is gathered by the ring in an understandable way to the user, we will develop an app. This app receives the data from the smart ring, and visualizes it. Not only does it tell the user what for example the light intensity is the plant receives, but also if this is good or bad. It tells you if there is too much light, or not enough. And how to act on this. In order to involve this part of our prototype in our user test as well, we designed part of this app in Sketch.

Besides that, we also got some sensor updates. Last sprint we got the light intensity sensor and air temperature sensor working. Now, the moisture sensor is working as well. This sensor will measure the moisture level of the soil. The soil temperature sensor also arrived and we’re working on that one.

Time for testing

After all the prototyping, it was time to do some user testing. For this sprint, we did 7 user tests. The way the test was set up, participants didn’t know beforehand what our prototype does and how it works. We showed the prototype without it being attached to the pot and asked participants for a first impression. They were pretty lost. After explaining what it does, it made much more sense. We asked them for feedback concerning the structure for vertical gardening, the looks and the functionality.

We also tested the prototyped app screens. We mainly focused on first impression and understandability. But even more important was finding out what users would want to be in the app that is not there yet. We not only asked them what was missing, but also asked for their opinion on gamification within the app. We presented several options concerning gamification.

• A point system. Points can be earned by completing tasks and challenges. For example taking care of your plants perfectly for 3 days in a row, or fullgrowing your first tomato plant. These points could be exchanged for different kinds of rewards, for example discount on a purchase or free seeds. In addition to or instead of these rewards, there could be a leaderboard.
• Playing individual or in a team. These challenges could be completed individually or in a team. For example with your friends, family or your neighbourhood.
• Personification of the plants. Instead of the app telling you what your plant needs, notifications are created from the plant’s perspective: I’m dehydrated! Give me some water! Besides that, plants can be visualised not only as a plant, but showing emotions. Taking care of your plant perfectly makes a happy plant, neglecting it makes a sad plant. 😔🌱

We analysed the testing results by creating this colour coded mind-map, so please zoom in and read carefully. Just kidding, these are the most important outcomes of our testing session:

• Vertical gardening is the right direction, considering the amount of space most people have in their homes. But the design now is too big and too visible. People want to enhance the beauty of their garden and see their plants grow.
• Sharing is a motivating factor. Wether it’s sharing knowledge, time or grown food: people want sharing with other gardeners to be part of their experience.
• So cultivating an experience of a virtual community garden can be a possible direction that we need to explore.
• Personification of the plant creates more empathy and is also a fun factor.

Another downside about this design is that stacking can’t be done too high, because the construction will lose stability. And if you’re wishing to grow five plants, that means you would have to buy five individual rings. 💸

Next steps…

So what are our big plans for sprint 3? Again, we set up some goals.

• Focussing on connectivity in communities. We noticed people want to share, work together and learn from eachother. We will focus on the way existing garden communities work.
• How to bring in the experience of community gardening, even for home gardening? How do we apply the knowledge from the previous point, into our product?
• Iterating on the design: how do we make it more universal? The ring-idea brings limitation, because of it’s shape and because it can only be used for one pot.
• Looking at the scope of Hydroponics from our project point of view. Hydroponics is a different way of growing plants. We want to explore if this could be suitable for our project and what the benefits would be.

See you next sprint!

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