Seed Craft Community & Hope Smart Pot
Graduation Project, Individual, 2017
The Seed Craft Community & Hope Smart Pot I designed during my final year in undergraduate studies, offered me the opportunity to work with many people who deal with agriculture and achieved encouraging results for nature's protection.
One of the main objectives of this project is to create a bridge platform between the people -who live in the cities- and the farmers -who threatened by industrial farming- where they can come together to protect organic agriculture and build sustainable gardening together while learning by doing. Due to rapid urbanization and having a lack of time & money make natural practices distant for children and young people. On the other hand, organic farmers threaten by the investment in industrial agriculture and leaving them with a lack of investment in the related technologies.
Thus, the project enhances the gardening experience by learning with Hope Smart Pot and provides job growth for organic farming through Seed Craft Community, which points out an idea of how different personas can work together and help each other by producing an economy.
During the project, I have been contacted with agricultural experts and institutions that offer people agricultural activities and gave me a chance to talk not only with young people and children but of all ages, to discuss what we all are longing for in nature.
The project I completed during my undergraduate study supported by the Izmir University of Economics and Japan SUAC University, exhibited in Japan and at Istanbul Innovation Week.
Problem
In the last ten years, Turkey's total agricultural production value, which has a 65% share, has declined over the years and decreased to 48% in 2013. Therefore, results that the number of farmers has fallen 48 percent in Turkey in the last 12 years.
Also, children and young people removed from nature due to urbanization and nature education have not been part of the curriculum, meaning that most of the children have not been taught how to practice with nature; therefore, they don't know how to defend nature from the harm.
User Profile
Gardening should be essential for every individual or community in terms of practicing exercise, relaxation, or recovery as a social need, meeting, and volunteering, or being a part of a broader environmental or financial policy.
Key Insight(s)
For reducing the time constraints for gardening, it is better to make the gardening activity more interesting for people involved. An activity as that is involved through mutual interaction.
As a solution to lack of information, people can get involved with a shared information platform by virtually or face to face with other gardeners who have advanced knowledge in gardening. Those meetings can be conducted in the physical environment by service and can happen virtually via the application.
An alternative modular product to overcome small space problem. Also, a need of solution that can meet with the user’s learning interest in gardening. Nongardeners should be at the core at learning gardening both in restraint spaces or in virtual life via the application.
Although gardening interest declines in younger age groups, there is still potential to see gardening as an activity. So, just like the chart showed us, gardening is vital to all age groups. Even though the priority is to teach younger people how to gardening, any person from any age group should be able to use and interact with it.
Key points above make the smart gardening more possible solution for people who live in cities.
Actions
1. Provide a community that local farmers and potential gardeners can share information
2. Design an interactive flower pot that informs you about it’s growing process.
3. Build an application that you can sync your plant and interact with other users during the plant’s growing process.
4.Help people come together through events. Events that are conducted to teach both store employees and users. Allow local farmers to share their experiences with others through events.
Seed Craft Community
A community that farmers and non-gardeners can come together and share information through learning by doing and gaining both economic and local growth.
Hope
The purpose of Hope Smart Product is to teach people how to garden, even in limited spaces. It creates a gamified interaction for the people to attract all ages, especially the children. Although the pot uses smart gardening technology, Hope, avoids automated gardening and offers users a fun learning through a physical relationship with their plants.
This interactive educational smart pot is where the local natural seeds are stored, and the users could grow them under the most favorable conditions.
There are sensors built to detect changes in the water, soil, and temperature. These data are stored in memory. Users can access by using their mobile phones via the application. Also, they share the plant’s update with the other users in the community.
Seed Box is exclusive for the Hope Pot. The box placed in the pot through sensors. Therefore, the soil interacting with a pod is improved to gather valuable information about your plant. Secondly, seeds are supplied from organic farmers, which means there can be seasonal changes for plants.
