Design Research
Product Design
UI Design
Design Challenge
Working in ambiguity, each team was tasked with creating a design solution for a chosen topic. My team’s was Environment, where we decided to venture into how we might best support the work of community gardens. Through design research, prototyping, heuristic evaluations, 3D CAD modeling, physical modeling, and branding, we proposed our concept: UrbaFarm.
My Role
Year
Project Manager
Research
UI Design
Digital Prototyping
Physical Prototyping
Spring 2023
Length
8 weeks
Problem
Many urban residents struggle to find open garden spaces and face challenges accessing local, fresh food. Demand for community gardens has surged post-COVID-19, straining urban planners, especially in densely populated areas lacking space.
We propose UrbaFarm, a joint endeavor in product and interaction design that uses a hydroponic tower system with a joint mobile app that promotes and manages urban community gardens. Our concept aims to empower individuals through hydroponics-based community gardens and enables people to connect, learn, and contribute to a sustainable food network in their own community.
Solution
We conducted research using a variety of frameworks such as: Offering Activity Culture Map, POEMS framework, and To-From Exploration, to find information about community gardens that could help us identify possible areas of improvement and select a direction for the project.
Research & Observations
To…From Exploration
Fieldwork Research
STEP 1: Key Aspects of the Project
Speculate on which aspects of the project have the most need for innovation.
Garden Design and Layout: The physical arrangement of plants, pathways and structures in the garden.
Community Engagement: Involving and empowering community members in garden activities, maintenance, and decision-making.
Sustainability Practices: Implementing eco-friendly practices (i.e. composting, rainwater harvesting, using native plants)
Education and Outreach: Providing workshops, classes, and resources for the community to learn about gardening and environmental stewardship.
STEP 2: Trends Related to Project Aspects
Identify the latest trends affecting the various aspects of the project.
Garden Design and Layout: Incorporating permaculture principles, maximizing small spaces, and integrating technology for efficient management.
Community Engagement: Leveraging social media platforms, gamification for participation, and inclusivity strategies for marginalized groups.
Sustainability Practices: Utilizing smart irrigation systems, and exploring vertical gardening for urban spaces.
Education and Outreach: Developing online learning modules, creating partnerships with schools or universities, and emphasizing experiential learning.
STEP 3: Current Perspectives based on Conventions
Describe the current conventions about each project aspect.
Garden Design and Layout: Conventional perspectives view garden design as primarily focused on aesthetics and plant organization, with limited integration of technology or innovative sustainability practices.
Community Engagement: Current perspectives on community engagement rely heavily on in-person meetings, flyers, and traditional outreach methods, often overlooking digital platforms and interactive experiences.
Sustainability Practices: Conventional sustainability practices in community gardens typically focus on composting, organic gardening methods, and water conservation, with limited integration of advanced technologies.
Education and Outreach: Traditional education and outreach in community gardens often involve periodic workshops, printed materials like brochures, and occasional guest speakers. The focus is on basic gardening techniques and general environmental awareness.
STEP 4: New Perspectives based on Trends
Based on your understanding about trends from Step 2, speculate about what could be possible. Think of how current conventions may be reframed.
Garden Design and Layout:
Incorporate smart irrigation systems utilizing IoT technology to optimize water usage based on real-time weather data and soil moisture levels.
Integrate modular garden structures that can be easily reconfigured based on seasonal changes or specific crop requirements, maximizing space and productivity.
Community Engagement:
Implement virtual reality (VR) garden tours and interactive workshops to engage a wider audience, including those unable to physically visit the garden.
Develop a community gardening app that facilitates collaboration, event coordination, plant sharing, and knowledge exchange among gardeners.
Sustainability Practices:
Develop blockchain-based systems to track and incentivize sustainable practices such as composting, rainwater harvesting, and carbon footprint reduction among garden participants.
Explore vertical gardening solutions using aeroponics or aquaponics systems, optimizing resource use and promoting year-round cultivation in limited spaces.
Education and Outreach:
Developing interactive online platforms offering virtual gardening classes, webinars, and tutorials accessible to a wider audience.
Utilize gamification elements such as garden-themed challenges, quizzes, and rewards to engage and motivate participants in learning sustainable gardening practices.
STEP 5: Innovation Opportunities
Discuss how these new perspectives can lead to potential innovations. Think of how the innovation intent could be framed up based on these new perspectives. Think about which of these new perspectives your organization has the greatest potential to deliver.
Garden Design and Layout:
Incorporating alternative forms of gardening such as Hydroponics, Aeroponics (vertical towers) or Aquacultures to facilitate urban gardening.
Developing predesigned garden maps depending on planting zones to make the gardening set-up easier.
Community Engagement:
Create a Gardening Club that hosts monthly events for the community at the garden, to encourage people to visit the garden and support it.
Create augmented reality (AR) experiences within the garden space, providing interactive educational content about plant species, gardening techniques, and environmental benefits.
Establish a digital platform for community-driven gardening challenges, rewards, and competitions, fostering teamwork, creativity, and sustainable gardening practices.
Sustainability Practices:
Develop a product that could aid in composting, water conservation, and irrigation.
Focus on sustainable materials for building community gardens and make them more affordable.
Develop systems to track sustainable practices such as composting, rainwater harvesting, and carbon footprint reduction among garden participants.
Explore vertical gardening solutions using aeroponics or aquaponics systems, optimizing resource use and promoting year-round cultivation in limited spaces.
Education and Outreach:
Implement AI-driven personalized learning platforms that analyze participants’ gardening interests, skill levels, and local environmental conditions to provide tailored educational content and recommendations.
Develop a training course on easy steps to create a community garden in your area, including materials, layout design, educational content about crops and plot designs, and gardening best practices to maintain the community garden running successfully.
The most impactful research was our site visit to Santa Monica's Ishihara Learning Garden Earth Day event, where we learned about contemporary approaches to gardening. Instead of traditional plot systems where people have their own space, the entire community garden is volunteer run with leaders who oversee the maintenance and organization of the plants and its members. This type of structure for a community garden inspired the set up for our own community garden concept.
Key Takeaways
1.The urban gardening market is growing rapidly, fueled by a desire for fresh, local produce, increased awareness of sustainability, and limited access to traditional gardening space.
2.There are limitations such as people not having access to a backyard or suitable outdoor area for gardening, traditional outdoor gardens restricted by weather conditions, and new gardeners who might lack the knowledge or experience to succeed on their own.
I began sketching the current user flow for the contacts app interface to see possible points to add the new microinteraction. While swiping down on the original view in the watch, the option to add a new contact appears, I thought this would be a good place to also offer a search bar. Another possibility was to add a search icon to the contacts list by the first category letter. Ultimately I decided to go with the search bar option as it had an easier and direct access point for the user. Next, I began ideating how this new flow would look like, taking inspiration from the “Search” flow in the AppStore App.
Hydroponic Tower Sketches
After discussing as a team, we decided to move forward with Anna’s proposal and further develop this concept. At this point in the project we also assigned roles:
Gio - UI Lead
Anna - Product Design Lead
Angel - 3D Modeling and Marketing
Dani - Project Manager and Physical Modeling
Although each team member contributed to every aspect of the project, having lead roles allowed us to work efficiently asynchronously and have a specific person guiding the completion steps for their designated area.
My initial proposal sketch for the physical product component of the project, a hydroponic tower inspired by the work of artist Anna Buitrago.
Angel’s proposed sketch.
Gio’s proposed sketch.
Anna’s Proposed sketch.
Hydroponic Tower Sketches: Final Iteration
Information Sketch (Anna)
3D Physical Model: Low-Fidelity
Initial material exploration with the texture of recycled plastics.
Emotion Sketch (Anna)
Our initial 3D physical model was based off of the low-fidelity ideation sketches from the concept we selected. It was rough and ready. But it allowed us to have an idea of aspects to change and update once we moved forward with translating the sketches into Fusion360 to design the digital model. This prototype was made using printer paper and a paper towel roll.
Low fidelity physical model
Orthographic Drawings (Angel)
Fusion360 3D CAD Model
Angel did an incredible job translating our sketches and ideas into a Fusion360 CAD model that each team member used to further explore materials and colors. This final CAD model was also the basis for the dimensions followed for the high fidelity physical model.
Fusion360 model exploded view
Material Exploration
Fusion360 rendered exploded view
Final render I used to create our presentation assets using photoshop. The model on the left and center show the product with the growing lights on, the model on the right shows the product with the growing lights off. Our hydroponic towers were designed to be about 6ft tall, with the option to remove or add panels to increase or decrease the height.
High Fidelity Physical Model
When we first designed the app, we took inspiration from current plant apps (i.e. Planta) in the market that allow users to diagnose plant sickness, keep track of watering and other gardening tasks, and the ability to join community groups to exchange gardening tips. Based on this approach, I sketched the first wireframe iteration.
App UI Prototype
Tittle screen and home page sketches.
Low-fi community page.
Mid-fi tittle page.
Plant Dr. and community page sketches.
Based on these initial sketches, our UI Lead, Gio, worked on low and mid fidelity prototypes of the app.
Low-fi Plant Dr. camera page.
Mid-fi tower maintenance.
Updated UI Sketches
Low-fi garden page and plot management system page.
Mid-fi garden map.
Mid-fi plot reservation system.
We conducted heuristic evaluations with stakeholders that provided valuable feedback. It was brought to our attention that our concept, as it stood at the time, lacked a concise lens through which we were designing. The question was posed wether our intent was to educate people about gardening with hydroponics, or if we had a focus on building community. At the time, our concept was based on the traditional plot system used at community gardens, so our reservation system would allow future members to reserve their own hydroponic tower in the garden and keep track of their plants progress and tower maintenance. We also received feedback regarding inconsistencies in the UI, specifically spacing and font variations.
After further discussion, we decided to swift our concept and redesign our app UI based on a community building lens. Our new community garden system was inspired by our findings at the Ishihara Learning Garden we had visited at the beginning of the project, where we learned the garden was fully volunteer ran, with every member contributing to the growth and maintenance of the entire garden, and having the possibility to participate in harvesting. Although an unusual set up for community gardens, we believed this system could allow members to focus in the community building aspect of being a part of the garden, and offering additional workshops for continued learning and building connections.
UI user flow for first-time user sign-up.
UI sketches for the community chat.
Garden plot management system and garden map sketches.
UI user flow for first-time user community garden volunteer sign-up.
App Design Guide
Font
Logo
Colors
Assests
Final Digital Product Experience
First time user sign-up.
Home page, calendar, maintenance days and events.
Community chat.
Future Possibilities
Community Garden Management UI/UX
Current POV: First-time community gardener
New POV: Community garden manager
We designed our app’s UI based on the perspective of a user joining a community garden for the first time. For future exploration, it would be interesting to see what the app could look like from the perspective of a garden manager and what additional features would need to be added to aid the work of a manager.
Further Product Development
Designed for those without access to hydroponics from cost or space
Possibility to further develop a product as a standalone
Our hydroponic tower system was designed for use in a community garden in order to give access to people in the community who might not otherwise be able to afford the technology to use at home. But we recognize that there could be a possible market to sell the towers as individuals units for customers who would like to have a hydroponic tower system in their home.
Stakeholder Presentation
Santa Monica Community Gardens
Ferris Kawar, Santa Monica College's Sustainability Manager
Due to the project’s time constraint, we did not get the chance to connect with Santa Monica College’s community garden. It would be valuable to gain feedback from members of the garden as well as from Ferris Kawar, who is SMC's Sustainability Manager, to further improve our physical and digital products.
REFLECTION
Taking a moment to reflect on the journey of this project, I am proud of the final products my team delivered. This was my first project as the official Project Manager, a position I willingly volunteered for as it is a career path I might be interested pursuing in the future. Based on prior experience in group projects, I anticipated a smooth sailing with my team, counting on a natural sync among members. On the contrary, we had multiple adjustment periods as everyone’s working styles differed greatly, and a few of our team members experienced unexpected family emergencies throughout the duration of the project. This challenged me greatly as the Project Manager, as I tried to find the balance between supporting my team and ensuring the project was moving on track to hit our deadlines. I am thankful for the resilience of my team and their willingness to show up, despite unexpected circumstances, setbacks, and concept pivots. I learned valuable project management tools and frameworks that will help me in the future. The growth I experienced as a leader will allow me to be more empathetic and adaptable in future projects, and helped me grow in my confidence sharing my ideas and taking the lead in guiding the direction of a project. Working on a solution that combined both a physical and a digital product was challenging, it pushed me as a designer to imagine the correlation between user experiences and how we could design products that were adjacent to each other, but still create that thread of connection. Through collaboration I’ve learned the importance of compromise when ideas different than mine are presented. Working in a team means trusting others to complete they work they have been assigned, fighting the impulse to intervene and finishing things myself when the results are not to my personal standards, but rather practicing articulating constructive feedback and collaborating to improve the final outcome. Overall I believe this project helped me grow not only as a designer, but as a team player and a strong leader.