Vertical Micro Garden

Urban farming for space-limited households

As Ugandas population is growing 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 move from a life where they can feed their family off of their own land, to a life where basic food supplies are a major expense. Vertical & Micro Gardening is trying to alleviate this with their vertical farm - that lets urban settlers grow their own food even in very space-limited homes.

We were approached by Vertical & Micro Gardening 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.

Partner: Vertical & Micro Farming (UIRI) Year: 2018 Sector: Agriculture

The Challenge:

DwB had to look at a wide array of challenges to design a better product for the users' as well as for Vertical & Micro Gardening's point of view. What are typical household and user contexts, behaviours and needs? What sort of foods do users want to grow, and what are the considerations for the different types of crops? What are the manufacturing limitations? These were some of the questions that needed answers.

DwB 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 Garden model.
To understand requirements for the different crop types and vermi composting, we consolidated with experts in permaculture and urban farming.
We performed deep comparative analyses of the current vertical gardens efficiency versus similar competitor products.
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/vermi needs and the manufacturability. It was also important to again involve the users and experts in our ideation through co-creational workshops
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Solution

The thorough design process culminated in two new vertical garden models. The 'Wall Leaning' garden and the 'Premium' garden, both addressing different aspects of the user needs, and Vertical & Micro Gardenings capabilities. (...)

The Premium model has a smaller footprint and crop yield, and is designed to facilitate indoor and smal balcony farming. While ...

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