Sensing the Best Way to Grow Plants
By Ruolin Chen, Diandre Sabale, Kriti Vidya
Problem and Solution Overview
Growing plants at home can be a sustainable practice that reduces one’s negative impacts on the environment. However, many people are deterred from trying to grow a plant at home, or do not consider sustainability as a factor when choosing or caring for plants. We want to try to reduce the barriers preventing people from growing sustainable plants at home by creating a platform that suggests appropriate plants to grow for users and also simplifies plant care scheduling. To do so, we propose the usage of a sensor that can be inserted into a plant pot that connects to a mobile app that gives reminders about when to do tasks like watering plants. The mobile app will allow the user to check the status of their current plants with sensors as well as search for new preferably sustainable plants to grow. The sensor will use environmental data to determine when tasks should be done and the appropriate amount of resources to use, helping users to grow their plant with sustainable practices. The plant recommendations will also be calibrated to user-input factors like location or space to not only give the user a plant they can be comfortable with growing, but also recommend plants that are environmentally friendly.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
Our stakeholders are people who grow plants, people who sell plant materials, and people who manufacture digital sensors. These groups would be involved in either the implementation or usage of our product, and would be affected by changes in how people grow plants. After identifying stakeholders, we decided that our design research goals would be to determine the most important factors the user group considers when growing plants. For our user group, we decided to target people who live in apartments, as initial research indicated that it was one of the groups of people most hesitant to grow plants. To gather user data, we first distributed a general survey about plant-care habits, then we selected individuals for an interview. We chose a general survey because it allows us to get universal data that would be useful for our end product. Then, we chose people with a variety of experience with growing plants who took the survey and reached out to them for interviews. These interviews were useful because they provided us with more in-depth information about people’s thoughts about growing plants and what kind of experiences we should accommodate.
Design Research Results and Themes
From our 37 survey responses, we were able to find general results about the current thoughts around growing plants at home, and also identified different types of apartment owners to interview. We found that 81.1% of people were interested in growing plants but only 45.9% of survey respondents had successfully done so. This indicates that a tool to help people actually follow through with their interests and grow plants at home for sustainability reasons could be useful. Most people also expressed that they had environmental factors that prevented them from growing plants, like sunlight, space, and time, but also had social factors like roommates or pets that could interfere with their practice. We could maybe design a tool to identify plants that could accommodate different situations. Most people also had interest in a wide variety of plants ranging from succulents to fruit to bamboo. This seems significant because it seems as though planters do not really consider the environmental sustainability of the plants they choose to grow, and instead focus on other factors like fruit production or aesthetics. We also found that apartment planters had a wide range of experience in growing plants, from having never done it to feeling very competent, so we would have to design a tool that accounts for these differences. The survey results were useful for getting a grasp of the general issues that modern house planting has with regards to planter experience and sustainability.
The high level themes that we found from all the participants is not knowing which plants to grow exactly in their apartment along with how to properly grow each of the plants. They all have noted the factors such as having limited lighting and space that have made it difficult for them to grow a lot of plants, especially edible ones. One of the participants noted that growing vegetable or fruit plants would be challenging and messy to grow inside their apartment which has limited them to grow more house plants or herbs. We had a participant that did not have much experience in growing plants and was not too interested as he did not have too much knowledge on growing plants and wasn’t sure how to get started. This was a bit similar to the other participants as they have also claimed that growing other types of plants takes quite a bit of research to get started and to make sure that this plant does not die. They all seemed to be interested in growing plants that don’t take too much time to manage as they have busy schedules. Most of the participants didn’t note that the plants they grew were for sustainable reasons but more for themselves.
We also noticed some patterns among the people who have some or a lot of experience with growing plants. They also have claimed that they struggle with remembering the needs of the plants that they grow. They are also afraid that they might not take care of their plants and have to see them die. These participants have been visually identifying when to water the plants and have not been tracking when they are watering plants on paper or any other details about their plants growth. However, they noted that it would be nice to have an application that would remind them of when to water their plants along with any other needs that each of their plants would need. When asking about what they do when their plants get sick, many have said that they just reference the internet to find an answer. They all have claimed it would be useful if an application provided them with guides for how to care for their plants along with being able to help them if their plants get sick and get a more accurate and immediate answer so they know what to do more confidently.
Proposed Design
From our research, we found that the one of the tasks that people needed help with regarding gardening were reminders about specific tasks related to their plant like watering their plant as we found that many would sometimes get too busy and forget to do the specific tasks for the plants. The other main task that people living in apartments needed help with was figuring out what plants they were able to grow with the amount of space, sunlight and other factors related to their environment. Even if they did end up picking a plant, they weren’t sure what the plant needed to be healthy. Due to this, we were thinking of solution ideas that would make it more convenient for people to do both the tasks. Our proposed solution involves a mobile application and sensors. Users can use the mobile application to get plant recommendations, search for particular plant types they are interested in, and even filter the search results. They are also able to store data about their plants if they create an account on the app and choose the plants they are growing. The sensors would automatically sense if a plant needs more water or sunlight and send a message to the user directly as a reminder.
The storyboard listed above is our first storyboard that describes the story of John who is interested in gardening but doesn’t have much experience and is not sure of what plants to grow in his apartment. So he uses our app to find some plants to grow. One of key design features is our recommendations page where the user is able to input the type of plant they want to grow, how much space they have, how much light they get into the apartment and the temperature. Once they input these parameters, they are able to get recommendations of sustainable plants that are capable of growing within their environment. Our app is also able to help the user store information about their plant growth if they choose to.
The second story board demonstrates our second key feature which is that the user does not have to set reminders themselves. The sensors are able to detect the plant needs like it needs more water and sends an alert to the user. This is demonstrated in the story board where initially the plant is not doing so well and so the sensor detects that and turns red. Then, it sends an alert to the user’s phone and so they are able to respond to the alert by watering the plant. Once the plant’s needs are taken care of, the light will turn green. By having these sensors, it is easier on the user to take care of their plant as they don’t have to keep track of when to water the plant or when to increase the amount of sunlight the plant receives or any other plant needs, the sensor will tell it to them automatically. This will also help the user to keep their plant healthy for a longer amount of time as health is something that most people who garden are concerned about regarding their plants.
We are excited to help people be more sustainable by helping them grow more plants at home. This would help decrease the amount of pollution that results from food production by reducing the amount of plastic that gets used and the amount of carbon dioxide that gets produced. We have learned so much through our first half of the project through research, designing, and storyboarding. We are now excited to start designing and refining the different aspects of our application.
