How about a virtual community garden?
A quick recap
As you all know by now, we are Team Future Farmers! We aim to develop a product/service which helps people grow food at home. We spent the first sprint researching our users, technology we can use and related products that are already out there. The second sprint was full of brainstorming, ideation, and prototyping. We created a beautiful prototype, a ring containing sensors to put around your pot. It wasn’t just a ring, we even developed a structure which made it possible to stack multiple pots on top of each other. We tested our prototype and… killed our darling. Plot twist.
But life goes on. So we developed new goals and started sprint 3.
Our hydroponic adventure
During Sprint 3 we went through a complete design process, packed in 3 weeks: starting with research during the first days, ideation, prototyping and testing our prototype during the last days. This is what our Sprint goal looked like:
Focus on a solution for a vertical Hydroponics garden at home with the experience of connectivity in community gardening.
Hydroponics?
Hydroponics is a method to grow plants in sand, gravel, or liquid, with added nutrients but without soil. There are at least six different methods to set up a hydroponic farm.
The basic principle of hydroponics involves pumping water that is enriched with the right nutrients and oxygen (through an oxygen pump). This water touches the roots of the plants while it keeps running by making it drip back into the container.
We visited two large-scale hydroponic farms, one in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week and another one at A labs Amsterdam.
The moment we realised we’re not IKEA.
After getting a thorough understanding of hydroponics and an ideation session to come up with a home-scaled hydroponics set up focusing on people with limited space, we realised hydroponics is not the right solution for our project:
- When you grow different types of plants, they need different (amounts of) nutrition. And this leads to a more complicated setup as a result.
- Setting up a Hydroponic garden takes some time and effort. And since we want our product to be accessible for beginning home farmers, or even people that start trying out urban farming because of our product, this might be too much commitment.
- Purchasing a complete Hydroponics setup from scratch is expensive: one needs an air pump, water pump, nutrients and the structure where everything comes together.
- Taking all the reasons above into consideration, Hydroponics is more efficient on a larger scale.
We couldn’t figure out a simple, cheap, accessible Hydroponic version of our product. We realised that this might not even be our mission. After all, we’re not IKEA. What distinguishes us from similar products shouldn’t be a simple and cool new structure for a hydroponic farm at home. What distinguishes us is that we can bring an experience of community gardening through our product/service: sharing knowledge, food, insecurities and milestones.
Changing directions
We decided to change our sprint goal:
“ Focus on bringing the experience of connectivity over gardening by drawing in the parallels from community gardening.”
Gardening might not seem like a social activity, but it is. During interviews and user tests, we noticed that sharing and connecting with other people is the most important and motivating factor. Showing their garden to their friends, being appreciated for the effort they put in their garden, asking questions when in doubt or helping out someone else in doubt, sharing their harvest or even connecting with new, like-minded people were some examples that came up during these interviews. Thus we mapped down the elements of community gardening and clustered them in three categories:
Taking these categories as a reference, we structured all the content that should come in the application. Afterwards we spent a lot of time paper prototyping the app. Wireframing, wireframing and wireframing. Our major challenges were:
- Creating the experience of a community garden, but from your home
- By creating this experience, and thus creating an online community, in some way we’re creating a social media-like platform. What are negative and addictive factors when it comes to social media? And how can we make sure that users wont experience these factors while using our app?
- Including all the different elements without making it seem to complicated
Prototyping
We cleaned up the screens and made a simple paper prototype to test with the user.
For our first user tests, we used the “wizard of oz” method. Anisha organized the testing session, Maitrayee was the wizard by making the prototype react as the user reacted to the paper prototype. Later we made the prototype digital using Invision.
Testing Results
- Navigation through the app is clear
- Answer section in the forum is still unclear
- A friendly way of social media
- People are still interested in challenging each other
Let’s code it
To turn our dreams into reality, our technical brains (Angelo and Joel) have started writing code in Android Studio. The app now has a page where the user needs to fill in the PIN of the SIM card which is located inside the product we will be developing later. This means the user can only use the app if they have our product. There’s a section where they can see their plants and their health. We also ordered a Pycom chip. The Pycom supports SIM input, which our client requests (because Vodafone Ziggo is a telecom company). Just in case the SIM input won’t be possible, the Pycom also supports Wifi, Bluetooth and Sigfox.
What’s next?
Our primary goals for Sprint 4:
- More user tests with our digital prototype (app)
- Focus on the physical product again
- Sending data from sensors to the mobile application
- Have a working prototype by the end of Sprint 4
We’ll see you again by the end of next sprint!
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.
