Grow your own!

Exploring Interactions Cycle 1: Ideate

Tino de Bruijn // 1354930

24 oktober 2012 Gert Pasman & Natalia Romero Herrera

Introduction
I still remember one of the vegetables I yielded from the schoolgardens (schooltuintjes) in the 3rd grade, a giant courgette. I weighted a couple of kilos and had grown so big, that it tasted of nothing but water. Still, the joy was great as I had grown my own vegetables and we ate them! Starting with this sustainability project I thought of several areas that could be explored for becoming more sustainable, and I finally stuck with food. Especially after I read 1 that (in the US) it takes on average 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food that is created. Wether this is true, and wether it costs the same here I dont know, but that is not the point. Also here in The Netherlands, we eat a lot of food that comes a couple thousand kilometers, all the way from Spain for example. And there should be easy ways to reduce those transportation kilometers. Of course, there are a lot of fruits and vegetables that dont grow in our climate, and that will probably still be eaten. However, food that is created at home doesnt have to be transported at all, and probably has other benefits as well.

lives that they start to care about these kind of things. Students like myself and my housemates generally dont have such a structured life or house that those things are easy to maintain. Friends of mine who start working however do, as they move to smaller houses and start to care more about what they do and how they live. Thinking back about the giant courgette I grew when I was young, I thought that satisfaction would be a nice feeling to evoke, as that would make that people continue doing the thing that gave them the satisfaction. This all added up to the following design goal:

I want young, working, people to get satisfaction from growing food at home
Interaction vision
The initial start where you have buy the plants and all attachments and take extra good care of them, takes some effort. But in the end, when preparing that meal with home grown elements, you feel satisfaction and reward for your hard work. One area where you also find this, is sports, and that is where I got the analogy for my interaction vision:

Design goal
This brought me to my design goal. As I want this simple thought of growing some food at home to become more widespread, I thought I would have to start with people who in a period in their
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http://blogs.scienticamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/08/11/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/ 2

You might have to drag yourself to the gym, do all kinds of crazy exercises and get completely exhausted, but afterwards you can op down on the couch and feel satised with your efforts

Interaction vision in pictures

Design and research activities

To find out what people do in the field of growing their own foods, I first asked a few people around me and fellow students whether they grow food, and what kind. I also asked them if they bought the little herb plants that you can buy in the supermarket instead of the prepackaged herbs. Most of these people sporadically bought these herb plants, had them for a couple of days, and used al the leaves in two or three meals. Sometimes the only reason to buy a plant was because it contains a lot more than the plastic packages, and the whole plant was consumed at once. I decided I wanted to interview some people in my target group that had the ability to sustain plants a little better, and see if they did so and why (or why not). I know a couple of people who moved out of their student houses in the last few years and I paid them a visit and held an interview. The first two I interviewed were two guys both 27 years old that live with three, in a small house in Scheveningen. They do have terrace on the first floor, in between the houses where they actually try to grow quite a variety of herbs. They had also grown some red peppers, and they still had a couple of them in their freezer. They liked growing stuff for multiple reasons, including the foods being cheaper, having it done while being raised and functional

decoration. An aspect that contributes to their greenness, is that they run a company that generates drink-water with renewable energy, so they are already into sustainable thinking. What I also learned is that they wanted to grow more, but didnt have the knowledge to grow more. They also thought they didnt have enough space and time to grow real vegetables besides their herbs. The other two people that I interviewed (25 and 26, living in Delft and The Hague) didnt grew anything. No herbs, no fruits, nothing. They did buy basil plants sometimes but never sustained them. One of them never thought of giving it water so it would grow. These were just consumed in two or three days. They provided me with quite some reason why the didnt grew anything, the most notable being: - not knowing what to grow and how - never having thought of the possibility - seeing it as something they would do later when living with a partner in a house with a garden - and getting the idea that you would have to eat the same for a couple of weeks because you would have yielded a lot. I put all the whys, why nots and concerns together in the mindmap on the following page. As I saw in my preliminary research that a lot of people buy packaged herbs, and sometimes a plant from the supermarket, I wanted to see this in action, to find out if I could learn something from it. So I went to the Albert Heijn to do some observations and questioning there, on a time I expected quite some people to get
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their diner. I observed at the vegetable alley, waiting for people that would get the prepackaged herbs, or the complete plants. In the three quarters of an hour that I waited, a lot of people passed by to get something to cook up, but only two did what I waited for. Those to people got one of the little plastic containers with herbs. I was able to ask them some questions, and found out that contrary to my believe they actually grew quite some herbs and vegetables at home. But that the ingredients they bought at this time either just went out, or would grow very well in the fall and winter here, but that they had a great flourishing pot of them during the spring and summer. So this attempt was not so fruitful, and tempered my urge to do observational research in shops. I did learn that even when you grow some of your own stuff, everything is so accessible in our country, that people will still buy it if they come short, or buying is much easier (than for example sustaining their thyme through winter).

Mindmap of reasoning and concerns found in the interviews

Results to Concept Direction

With the design goal and interaction vision in mind I started looking at the reasons I found why people wouldnt grow their own food, and how I could cancel these out, or transform them to one of the reasons there are why people do grow edible for themselves.

Thinking about using the found reasons to grow Thinking about countermeasures for reasons not to grow
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I started scribbling about the different reasons and concerns one by one, as you can see on this page. After a while it appeared to me that I could probably combine quite some of these aspects. Infrequent use, and the fear of having to big of a yield could be solved by sharing or exhanging with other people. By exchanging different species, one could also grow less different plants themselves, reducing the specific knowledge needed to cultivate these plants. But how do you get to know people near you that also grow edibles? Well, there are quite some ways, but one that is applicable to every neighborhood is the web. A platform where you could see who does what you do in your neighborhood would be great. One example of such platform is EveryBlock 2, a service where people can exchange information about their neighborhood. There even was a post3 about a fruit trade! One of the difficulties with such platform however, is to get people to signup and start using the service. Only when somebody else from your neighborhood has signed up you will get the benefits from enlisting. I think this problem can be (partially) solved by also creating a physical product, that can be sold in easy access stores as supermarkets. This physical product should stimulate growing your own food, and promote the platform. An example of such a product could be a starters kit for one kind of vegetables, say tomatoes. It would contain seeds or seedlings, small pots, a grow guide and a message that this kit is part of a
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bigger project. That when you have finished growing your tomatoes, one of your neighbors maybe has finished growing his courgettes, and that you could exchange!

http://www.everyblock.com/ http://blog.everyblock.com/2012/sep/27/foodsharing/ 8

Further Explorations
The concept direction is broad, and there are many things that will need to be explored further in the next cycle to come to a concrete idea.

What form should the service have?

We can think of social platforms, mailing services and what not. Maybe it would also be possible to integrate with existing services as the aforementioned EveryBlock or Facebook. So there is a lot to explore in cycle 2!

What should be the main selling point?

The physical objects that are sold in stores form the connection between an easy start of growing your own food and connecting with others to make this growing even more satisfying. But the question is how to promote that well. Maybe a financial advantage is such a great trigger for people to start growing themselves that that is better advertisement than the whole concept itself. So what triggers people to invest?

What physical product is necessary start or trigger service involvement?

What form should that product have? Should it be a book or manual, just providing the knowlegde? Should it be a simple plant with a message printed on its foil that you can do more? Or be a full fledged starter kit for some sort of vegetable?

Should it be limited to a certain scope?

Usually apples and oranges dont compare well, but in this context it is probably a good trade. Exchanging potatoes for basil leaves might not be. So should we pick a niche in foods to grow, and if so, what niche?
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