Following smart city plan, what we can do is to upgrade traditional facility and service, take advantage of technology and promote people’ eco-awareness.
Smart City
Nowadays, more and more cities in the world join in the Smart Cities Plan, including Australia. This plan sets up a new framework for cities policy, which aims to support and build productive, accessible and livable cities, to deliver better outcomes for our cities and people.( https://cities.dpmc.gov.au/smart-cities-plan)
Our project is basing on the smart city concept, building eco-friendly community garden. Before we actually developed our product, we had interviews with our target group(retirees) and listed key points from their speeches. Basing on that, the human value was dug out. Our team picked two interesting values which shown in the pictures below. Doing something good can make people treat things in a positive way and building bond between people and garden. Besides, learning something new can always keep people interested and curious, which could be the best way to attract people’s attention.
In terms of technology side, elderly people were inclined to simple technology, and most of them were not open to mobile applications. Thus, we can only include simple and visible technology to the target audience.
Worm-farm
“Did you know that worms will eat most of your kitchen waste and process it into rich plant food. Best of all worm castings and worm tea have amazing benefits for your gardens health as they help increase the immune system of plants.” — http://www.tumbleweed.com.au/WormFarming.aspx
Ezi-worm is how we call this project. Worms are the base of this facility, they digesting organic food scraps, excreting casting and turn it into liquid fertiliser finally. It can be considered as a very good approach to reduce waste and keep plants thriving. Putting soil, some worms and food scraps into the container can just make this facility work in gardens.
In order to persuade people to take actions, we designed two light bars to display the data transferred from the database about waste capacity and container temperature which would be placed in the household kitchen bench to keep people informed of the waste capacity and container temperature. The two data comes from a distance sensor, temperature sensor and light sensor fixed below the container lid. The purpose of this facility is to make people pay more attention to the garden and contribute to the garden, which matches the human value “do something good”. Besides, how this system works is also educating, especially to young children. Learning something about agriculture from practice is interesting and fun, raise environmental awareness. Finally, the light sensor can help calculate how many visitors daily, monthly and yearly, to better improve community gardens.
As we actually deployed our projects into a garden, we found out some problems by having interviews with people. Demographics is a serious problem because the facility can be only used widely and wisely for big families. Retirees and people who live alone do not have much leftover in general. Besides, the facility does process food waste, but at the same time, some people who waste a lot would feel less guilty for wasting and children might waste food deliberately to feed worms for fun. which violates the original purpose.
The project still has a long way to go, but the most important thing we are glad to see is more people try to keep a balance between work and life. Staying close to nature with a tech-brain is what people like to be in recent years.
