Bonsaquarium

Alex Zhou, Vania Regita, Giselle Gunawan, Eric B

Problem and Solution Overview

Bonsai plants are notoriously tricky plants to take care of. They need specific amounts of water and fertilizer, else they die. Beyond that, sickness in bonsai plants can be difficult to deal with. Still, bonsai plants are immensely rewarding to take care of due to their longevity and beauty, making them an attractive challenge for all.

We want to make growing a beautiful bonsai tree simple and accessible to gardeners of all skill levels. With the bonsaquarium, gardeners don’t have to worry about a variety of tasks. For casual gardeners, the automatic watering and fertilizing will be nice in case they forget. Even serious gardeners will appreciate these features, as it will allow them to take vacations with no worries about how to water their plants. Other features of the bonsaquarium, like health problem detection and automatic grow lights can enable experienced gardeners to grow a greater variety of bonsai then they could normally.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
The people we pursued for our design research are bonsai experts, inexperienced bonsai owners, and gardeners who are not restricted to only taking care of bonsais. We do this through the research methods of interviewing and sending out surveys. The people we interviewed were avid gardeners who do not yet own a bonsai plant. Through these interviews, we learned the reason as to why they choose to not own a bonsai and also potential areas of difficulty for amateur bonsai owners. Interviews also let us dig deeper as to what the problems are so that we have adequate information to determine what problems we want to solve with our design in order to ease the process of tending to a bonsai. As for our second research method, surveys, we were able to reach a wider audience of experienced bonsai owners in online platforms such as reddit and other bonsai forums. In total, we were able to collect 40 respondents with 80% of them owning 4 or more bonsai plants with at least 4 years of experience. These surveys helped us get more accurate and less skewed data of completing the day-to-day tasks needed to grow a healthy bonsai. Additionally, it also allowed us to better shape our design by learning whether the factors we think are important are truly as important as we think they are.

Design Research Results and Themes
Based on our survey and interview results, a common trend that emerges is that most of the tasks of tending to a bonsai that we listed are rated as difficult (rating of at least 4 at a scale of 1–5, with 5 being the most difficult). The top two tasks that are rated most difficult by popularity are identifying and intervening when the tree is unhealthy. Even for experienced bonsai owners, repetitive tasks such as fertilizing and watering can be a hassle due to time constraints and having to follow a specific pace for optimal care and growth of the bonsai.

In addition to fertilizing, watering, and taking care of an unhealthy bonsai plant, 70% of our survey participants agree that in-depth information and guides for specific bonsai species are not readily available. As a result, they often find it difficult to give appropriate care for more obscure bonsai species. Another key information we got from our design research results is that some people are not willing to grow a bonsai plant due to its finicky and expensive nature, making it seem like it’s not worth the money and effort if it deteriorates due to non-optimal care.

Proposed Design

In order to greatly simplify the experience of owning a bonsai tree for the first time we wanted to help minimize uncertainty surrounding the tree’s conditions. Not knowing if a tree has received the right amount of sunlight or water makes it difficult for new bonsai owners to focus on more interesting tasks like training the tree. Thus we propose a design that can help control those variables: the bonsaquarium.

The bonsaquarium is a glass tank with sensors, lighting, sprinklers, and an interface

The physical bonsaquarium (pictured) is similar to a fish tank with a touch screen and some bonsai-specific hardware. It can water and fertilize the tree, as well as providing humidity, lighting, and temperature regulation. By allowing users to set watering schedules, light amounts, and fertilizing schedules (tasks that our research indicates are time-consuming but not difficult), we make it a lot easier for users to focus on the unique and difficult parts of owning a bonsai tree.

The most difficult task (as identified by our survey) is knowing how to help unhealthy trees.

One such struggle that especially challenges new owners is intervening when the tree is unhealthy. This is apparent when looking at the aggregate responses to our survey, and becomes more pronounced when looking only at new bonsai owners. To help with this the bonsaquarium can use its historical sensor data and information a user provides about the type of tree, its age, etc. to identify possible problems that the user can then triage and attempt to fix.

An example of sensor data providing actionable suggestions of what might be wrong.

As seen in the sketch, the bonsaquarium also constantly attempts to identify potential issues like lack of fertilizer, not getting enough light, root rot, pests, and other maladies. When a potential issue is found, the screen alerts the user of the potential problem.

This design should help lessen the mundane and confusing work associated with owning a bonsai tree and help new bonsai owners keep their trees healthy and beautiful.