Vertical Farm
Urban farming for space-limited households.
The 'Premium Vertical Farm' is a modular, stackable vertical garden solution that also utilizes worm compost to boost soil fertility.
The product was developed in Uganda, a country where the population grows at a faster pace by the year. More and more people move from their rural villages into the bigger cities in search of a better life.
They are moving from lives in which they can feed their family off of their own land, to lives where basic food supplies represent a major expense. Vertical & Micro Gardening (VMG) is attempting to alleviate this issue with their vertical farm product that let's urban settlers grow their own food even in very space-limited homes.
We were approached by VMG with the task of redesigning their innovative Vertical Farm product. It was difficult and expensive to manufacture, and several user centric aspects could be improved upon.
Three concrete modules come together to make one level. Users can decide on the amount of levels according to their specific needs.
The concrete module solution allows VMG to offer a variety of different material and color finishes - while being cheaper and easier to produce than the original model.
The vertical farm also has a 'vermi (worm) compost' tube that runs through the core of the soil. Food/green waste is discarded in the tube and processed by special earth worms -
supplied by VMG. Learn more about how vermi compost works:
PROCESS:
We surveyed a wide array of challenges in order to design a better product for the users as well as for VMG's point of view.
What are typical household and user contexts, behaviors and needs? What sort of crops do users want to grow? What are the manufacturing limitations?
We involved both users and experts throughout the process.
We uncovered user centric needs, attitudes and behaviours by interviewing and observing usage in households that had the original Vertical Farm model.
To understand requirements for the different crop types and vermi composting, we consulted with experts in permaculture and urban farming. And engaged with said experts
and users through ideation workshops.
We performed comparative analyses of the efficiency of the current vertical farm versus similar competitor products to determine targets.
This informed a wide set of parameters that fed into the ideation and conceptualization phase - where we generated ideas that would balance between satisfying the user needs, the crop needs and the manufacturability.
When prototyping the chosen concept we also heavily focused on arriving at a production method and tools that were user-friendly for VMGs workshop artisans.
For more info:
benjamin@gmail.com
https://www.benjaminrodahl.com/
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