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Short update for this week. I was lucky enough to hop over to Paris for a well deserved break. While I was there however I managed to do some research into the French design market. I rarely get the chance to have an insight into the state of the market of a place like Paris. Strangely, I feel France doesn’t export it’s design as much as places in Scandinavia or the UK. Maybe I just haven’t opened my eyes to it before but with this assumption in mind I was pleasantly surprised to see the place buzzing with interesting trends and opportunities.

As many know who have visited Paris, there is a classic that exists on almost every building facade. The Parisian balcony is almost an established right! Most people in the inner city have one. And a lot people use it. From simple hanging potted plants to entire window frames covered in teaming nature; it’s quite a beautiful thing and something I see as a great opportunity. People want to show off their plants, it’s part of their furniture. An extension of their homeliness to the outside world. A dynamic evolving ‘art gallery’ of nature. So far in my research here in Denmark I had only seen the plants from the inside. After seeing the Parisian balconies I notice more and more how, even thought the culture is different, in Denmark too this show exists. Except that it exists behind glass. Behind a frame of their large Danish windows. This led me to think seriously about how you can enable people to express this is even richer ways. My question would be (as I am an interaction designer concerned with the impact of technology on human behaviour), how would technology enhance this? And how can it do it in a really valuable way? It’s something I hope I can explore in my prototypes (planning is underway!).

Another great experience was co-creating seed boxes here in Paris. I was lucky enough to observe an exercise in which an old wooden delivery crate was converted into a seed box for indoor propagation. Doing this entirely with someone who had never done it before and providing minimal guidance was a real eye opener. There was a general idea of what needed to be achieved but like everything, god was in the details. How do you line the box? Can I use tape? How do I plant the seeds? Do I water it now? And finally, my favourite question of all when it was all done: Now what? Preparation was a big thing. Almost half the time was spent looking for the right materials; the soil, the lining, stones etc. It was only smooth because luckily there were seeds and a box already available. One thing that stood out in this regard was that once the seeds were planted it became apparent that there was more space left for more seeds. At the this point the other person started to see the potential of the box and disappeared into her house looking for any more seeds she had. This for me was the point where she was comfortable to start experimenting, to start ‘playing’ as it were. My main take away from this however was quite simple. For someone to learn and see the potential in something, especially when it comes to gardening I think, you just need to try it out. You just need to do. Really if I can manage to get people in that zone where the ‘difficulty of the details’ have been designed to make it easy and comfortable then I can really see a positive added value in the service offering in the end. This will be my focus for the first round of prototyping I feel.

Et viola! There’s some notes from my time in Paris; not all but the main ones. I want to start using my time effectively on planning and developing prototypes.

To the workshop!

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After a shaky start to the week in which my schedule decided to delete itself, in the end it was a pretty productive time in the project. Decisions were made and I now have a bit more of a focus on what it is that I’m tackling as my design challenge. This is good. This is the point I want to be at now. For the next two weeks we are taking a break from the thesis to concentrate on the second industry project commencing next week. To be in a position where I can start to prototype some experiences is a great place to be.

After a lot of back and forth between what it is that I’m actually doing I have finally settled on the idea of a subscription service for herbs that will act as my main business model focus. From there I hope that my thesis will explore how using this as a platform I can start to inspire people to start growing their own gardens. In relation to my research it makes perfect sense. People are overwhelmed by the amount of involvement and investment needed to actually start a garden. Just today I made a trip down to the local shopping centre to find some compost for one of my prototypes. I knew they sold compost but it took me some time to find the right one. The compost says Potting Soil but I’m confused because what if I want to use it in my garden. I know from experience that it’s perfectly ok to use if you have to but someone starting out on this joinery could be stuck to the point of just giving up because there was nothing else. “Dam I need to go to a gardening centre” I imagine them thinking. And for a moment I thought the same. This mundane little problem is THE problem. So if you could conveniently just get everything delivered to your home. Step by step. That would be great. The subscription service offers a direct channel of delivery and communication between a service and the consumer. The potential for such a channel is immense. You could provide information and knowledge to consumers and since they are already part of the convenience service you could slowly allow them to progress into gardening by simply having the service understand them as people and what they need. What they already now. What they don’t know. What they might like.

And it doesn’t stop there. What if you could enable consumers to connect with each other? What if you could enable them to help each other out leveraging the power of the network. Of course this is beneficial to both consumers AND the service. As a service you get the added benefit of having your consumer base identify needs and opportunities for you in terms of future development. It’s almost like the software model applied to gardening! Start simple, make a good product and develop a good relationship with you customer and then give them what they want. Much has been talked about the value of user groups in the past and I can see a great opportunity in providing this to people who have a little balcony garden or a herb garden in their kitchen or even just a single pot of bamboo. They have the platform to pass their knowledge and show off their achievements. It would be my dream to have people bragging about how big their chilli plants are or how healthy their little basil plant is.

So the challenge is set now and submitted for review by my peers at CIID. My trip to Paris at the end of October is booked and I’ve already planned a stage of co-creation and user validation for some concepts that came out of the brainstorming sessions held this week at CIID. Some great ideas came up and even some ideas that I already had. Which to me is great to hear because it means people are still on the same wavelength and seems to understand what it is that I’m trying to do with this thesis. Now it’s a matter of laying out the blueprint for the service and using my prototyping phase to test certain key touch points especially around the ideas of providing a smarter service relationship with consumers, allowing consumers to ‘learn together’ and in how to create a ‘co-creation culture’ (user group) akin to that already seen for urban gardening initiatives in which people come together with similar goals and desires to grow. Hopefully I will be able to engage the urban gardening community to provide some input in to the design process as to make it technically solid in understanding some of the constraints with growing indoors, problems with growing in the Danish climate and guidance in the design of the physical artefacts. These guys have the experience I don’t yet and will be able to tell me something is feasible or if it would last for more than a season etc. Also it may evolve to the point where I try to, through my thesis outcome, connect people like urban gardeners with people who aren’t to create some kind of knowledge exchange between the two… not sure yet. We’ll see how the relationship progresses!

So there’s a bit of an update on the project so far. You can see it’s focused down a fair bit now and that good because I feel I’ve identified more concretely exactly the things that I am interested in developing throughout this thesis. I’ve got the good idea. I’ve got this vision. It’s time to put in the work, work, work,!

Till November! Stay tuned!

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Busy week behind me this week. My research evolved into meet & greet with local gardeners and a business that specialises in a delivery box service in Denmark. There were some interesting take aways from all the experiences and I feel like I’m now ready to start a bit more of a formal relationship with a few people that I can identify as my target consumers. And luck behold I found out that a community of urban gardeners even exist just outside my doorstep in Orestad! Un-grounded boxes have been setup with soil for local residents to use to grow anything they want. Chatting with a guy around the site I learned that it was being set up in response to a massive demand from the local residents. Waiting lists are growing and growing (sorry for the pun). The problem comes that a lot of the land, even though Orestad itself is but a stones throw from farms and unused land, is not able to be used for growing directly from the soil because of real estate developers sitting on it to build more and more housing and business develops as Orestad ever expands. The trick is to make it something mobile like the un-grounded boxes. A clever solution that allows the gardeners to simply up and move when the developers come knocking.

This is how I see the long term future of such community endeavours. Instead of staking out a single spot in-between the buildings (land which value increases a lot as more and more people move into Orestad) in maybe that a new type of garden mobility will have to be created so that like gypsies the gardens can travel around the city grabbing sunlight, water and nutrients from the environment wherever it stops off. It’s an inspiring idea I think. But how could something like this exist? This may well be another design challenge that I face if I was to target existing urban gardeners..

Another key theme that seems to be emerging is the raising of awareness of urban gardening as an engaging, fun, fruitful (sometimes!) activity. I’ve lived in Orestad now for almost 8 months and I never new about the urban gardening initiatives just a minutes walk away! Actually this could even link with the idea of mobility. Mobility may provide the ability for urban gardeners to move their gardens around, simultaneously promoting their activities throughout the city. Can you imagine a gardener from Orestad settling his garden in Fredrieksberg and instantly causing a flurry of interest from people in the area to join in. On a long enough time scale we could be seeing emergent behaviour and a type of urban gardening not really seen before. Gardens that are dynamic, evolutionary and ‘synced’ with the “nature of the city”. It’s a nice vision and now it would be great to find a way to work back from it and develop product (or service) solutions for people living in cities now. A solution where you can start from your home. In any case it’s time to get the opinions, visions and ideas from those who have tried.

I also had the chance to check out the LIVING exhibition at Louisiana Art Museum north of Copenhagen. It had a amazing examples of this dynamism I talk about actually in action. Specifically the Burning Man temporary city in Nevada that gets rebuilt every year from scratch as a way for the participants to ‘reboot’ as they say. Get away from their struggles of everyday life and be free to express themselves as they want. In particular a case study that stuck with me was the comparison between the block city (apartment blocks of identical design and construction stamped on the land until all space is used) and the designer city (super star architects leaving their mark on the city with wildly differing expressions). What came out of this investigation was a nice notion. Why not combine the two to create a Modular City. One were expression is encouraged but in light of a few key standard principles so that buildings, cities, mega-cities of the future stay inherently ‘human scale’ and at the same time desirable. It made me realise that maybe instead of approaching the idea of gardening service or product in the home as a single object that solves all problems and makes it as easy as possible. A set of modular principles could be laid out in some way to provide an extendable, customisable system for learning, growing and sharing. Mobility and dynamism for the modern domestic environment. Interesting stuff.

So a bit of a hectic week ahead but I have it all planned out and am ready to go go go. Till next week!

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