Process

With the goal of making use of local resources as a way of sustainability, we started ethnography research about local food, the data we gathered from research informed that volunteers working in community gardens is a good way to keep local resources stay in local area and reduce the need to bring food from faraway. The problem community gardens confront is most of the volunteers will not come back to the garden. There are not enough people to work in community gardens to keep gardens thriving. Therefore, we designed an ambient device to keep volunteers connected with community gardens and thus as an encouragement for them to go back working in gardens.

The ambient device is a clear plastic planting pot. The pot has LED lights in colors programmed to represent designated activities in the garden. Colors will change according to keywords in updates to the garden's Twitter account, cycling through several colors that inform the user of certain keywords such as blue for water, yellow for weeding, red for harvesting, and green for planting. Volunteers can keep this pot at home or work and get to know what’s going on in the garden to keep them connected with garden.

My Role

• Co-conducted numerous forms of ethnographic research: a focus group, field observations, ethnographic observations, contextual inquiries, and interviews.
• Co-analysis data gathered from researches with affinity diagram.
• Co-wrote paper “Gardening for Community” for CHI 2009 student design competition.