The time has come, plants can talk!
What if growing your own food at home is fun and informative at the same time? What if, the food you grow, grows faster, is healthier and tastes better than the food you buy at the supermarket?
What if we can make all these ‘What if’s’ come true? That's our goal!
Team introduction
Yep, that’s us. A diverse team full of motivation and willing to tackle the problem. To get to know us a little better, here’s a little introduction to all of us:
Anisha sivakumaran
Anisha is our Herb plant essential and utilitarian. She is a designer and just finished her Bachelor Degree Communication and Multimedia Design. She is 21 years old and loves dogs, food and music.
Angelo Moestadja
Angelo is our evergreen Bush, A lot in a small box. He is 21 years old and studies Game Development at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. During this course, he’s learning multiple programming languages. He loves to eat pizza while watching Netflix!
Maitrayee Sohni
Maitrayee is our spider plant, fast at her task. She is a designer and is 26 years young. She originates from India but she has been living in America for the past two years for her Master Degree in Industrial Design.
Joel Ruhe
Joel is our Cactus, survivor in all the situations. He is a programmer and studies Technical Computing at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. He is 19 years old, the seedling of our team.
Ilaria Zonda
Ilaria is our amazing coach from Italy, a silent motivator who keeps guiding us. She is a Post-Master Researcher and visual designer with a passion for gardening and learning new techniques to grow plants. Next to taking care of her plants, she loves to go for a bike ride.
Coming to the point
One thing which is common among all of us is our passion for food and gardening. We have all opted for the Smart Growkit project. The project is part of the Digital to Physical track and focuses on all “what-ifs” described above. Because if all what-if’s stay what-if’s, things will continue to be how they are right now. The way we produce our food now involves a lot of problems:
- Chemical pesticides are used to produce food for large quantities
- The current way of growing food requires a lot of water
- All food must be transported to supermarkets and often comes from far distance
- In order to keep food preservable for a longer time, chemicals are being used
Long story short, the way we grow our food now is unsustainable, bad for the environment and not as healthy and fun as growing food at home.
Sprint 1
During the first two weeks, before the start of sprint 1, all of us participated in team bonding activities to get to know each other better. During fun workshops and trainings we discovered our strengths and weaknesses. We initiated our project by visiting Anna’s Tuin, a Permaculture based garden. Not only did we learn what permaculture is, but we even got our hands dirty by doing some gardening followed by a delicious meal with our team . Over the meal, we got to know each other a little bit more. We discussed our team goals and rules.
These first two weeks we immediately started planning our first sprint with Ilaria’s help. We figured out a lot of User Research, Market Research and Tech Research had to be done. So basically, a lot of research. To get high quality results, we used methods from the Design Method Toolkit.
Design challenge
We brainstormed together with Jan, our client from Vodafone/Ziggo, about what our product/service should include. The result of this brainstorm session was our final design challenge statement.
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 plant’s health.
Design Method Toolkit
The Design Method Toolkit enables you to get started and enrich your design process. During the first sprint especially the research methods were very useful. We used the following methods:
- Survey: when there is a need to validate information in a quantitative way.
- Focus group can be used to get different views on a product or service, when there is an already existing solution or to identify current opportunities in a specific field. This was part of our qualitative research.
- 1-on-1 interviews: facilitates quick and early discovery; best for personal information. When there is a need for information from users and/or experts.
- Empathy in action. To really get to know the user’s needs, feel what they feel: what are the insecurity’s, struggles and happy moments they experience?
- Empathy map can be used to visualise all the data that was gathered during the interviews, focus groups and surveys.
- Design persona. A Design Persona helps you target the personality the user will experience in your design.
User Research
Why? If we don’t understand what our users need, or if we simply ask our users what they need and don’t listen on a deeper level of understanding, this is what happens.
So what are our user’s needs and how do they take care of their plants right now?
To gather as much valuable information as possible from our User Research, we structured the chosen methods from the Design Method Toolkit:
As you can see we used a survey for the quantitative research. We gathered a lot of information, but it wasn’t enough. We needed to get away from our desks and meet our target group. We used 1-on-1 interviews and focus groups for that.
We visited Anna’s Tuin again which is also a community garden, next to Science Park. we made several visits to talk to experts and our target group. We planned on doing a focus group, but we figured out quite soon this did not work out. We switched to 1-on-1 interviews and gathered a lot of valuable insights.
To feel what a beginning gardener feels, we planted some seeds ourselves. We planted some tomato, arugula, cress and spinach seeds in a growkit(inside) and some lettuce, spinach and carrots on the rooftop of the BPH:
Especially when the seeds were not germinated yet, we felt very insecure about our new mom and dad skills. Are we giving enough water and love? Are they getting enough sunlight? Is the soil rich enough in minerals? We recognised these struggles were similar to struggles we heard about during the interviews.
To visualise the information we gathered during the interviews we created this empathy map. The Empathy map consists of the categories ‘say and do’, ‘pain’, ‘gain’, ‘see’ and ‘hearing + feeling’. We filled out the categories based on the information we got from the 1-on-1 interviews:
Based on all our User Research, we created the persona. Creating a persona basically means stereotyping our target group based on the research. Our persona will help us while designing the product/service, so we know who we’re designing for.
We created 3 persona’s: the beginner, the expert and the uninformed. The beginner just started gardening and knows the basics. The beginner experiences a lot of insecurities and struggles while taking care of the plants. The expert has been gardening for a long time and knows what it’s all about. A real pro. The uninformed persona has no idea about urban farming yet, but isn’t necessarily uninterested. Let’s say we’re talking about a potential user here.
Important outcomes of the User Research:
- People don’t know if their plants are healthy (do they get enough or too much water and sunlight? Is the soil still rich on minerals?)
- Most people don’t have a lot of space to grow their own plants at home
- Taking good care of the plants is time consuming
- People have trouble with bugs and insects
Market Research
Before creating our product we wanted to know more about similar projects/products/services. We could use these other projects to gain knowledge and inspiration, or to learn why they didn’t work out. We divided the projects we found into different categories: Plant sensors, Indoor Smart Plant Growers, Plant projects, Automated tools and DIY Arduino kits. Eventually it looked like this:
But how come none of these products really broke through? We figured out which factors these products are still missing. These factors are our opportunities for our own product:
- Connectivity between users
- Understandable communication between product and user
- Cost efficiency
- User guidance
Tech Research
In the design statement we pointed out that the technology should be easy to use. Everyone should be able to use our product, not only people that understand technology and sensors.
We researched different sensors and chips we could use. But the most valuable part of this research was to just do it yourself. So we took an Arduino and some sensors and started playing around with it.
Factors plants need are sunlight, right temperature, water and a good soil condition. We started with a light intensity sensor and a temperature sensor. We programmed the sensors using the Arduino IDE. This is what our setup looked like.
Long story short
In the end of sprint 1 we could really set requirements for the product/service we are designing based on the insights from our research. The requirements for our product/service are:
To be continued…
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