![]() These representations and prototypes were documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages that might emerge at the intersection of technology and agriculture. More than a discursive platform, the workshops were design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. The workshops drew equally from practices of participatory design, critical design, social practice art, and DIY culture. The Growbot Garden project was structured around a series of public and participatory workshops that brought together diverse constituencies to critically think about, discuss, and debate, agricultural technologies for small-scale agriculture. The question we ask is, Can design and engineering now play a role in shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services and systems would need to be designed and engineered to enable that subversion and shift? How will technologies of automation and monitoring need to be refigured for these contexts – if indeed they are still at all useful? The growBot garden project explores these questions by bringing together designers, artists, farmers and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture? ![]() Recently, however, many have called attention to the shortcomings of mainstream farming endeavors - large-scale agri-business may be producing more food, but the food itself is lacking in nutrition and the environment is suffering from these very farming practices.Įngineering and design played a role in advancing the culture and practices of agri-business by producing products, systems, and services to advance and support large-scale corporate farming. Over the past 100 years, the practices of agriculture have been radically altered in Western societies, spurred by development and application of a host of technologies designed to automate and monitor food production. The following is copy borrowed from the general description of the project on the Public Design Workshop site. My specific contributions were the design of teaching tools for the workshops and the design of an series of workshops as part of a residency at 01SJ 2010. Further, the pilot experimentation in school settings indicates that the comprehensive system design method results in a deployable system, which can become well adopted in the educational domain.The Growbot Garden project was a project I contributed to in various way through my involvement in the Public Design Workshop. An experiment with nine GrowBots shows that the different parameters can be controlled, that this can control the growth of the food plants, and that control to make an environmental condition with blue light results in higher and larger plants than red light. The GrowBot system also allows the user to monitor the environmental conditions, such as CO 2 monitoring for photosynthesis understanding, on both the touch display and the remote web–interface. This allows school pupils to easily program the GrowBots to different growth conditions for the natural plants in terms of temperature, humidity, day light cycle, wavelength of LED light, nutrient rate, etc. ![]() Inspired by educational robotics, we developed user-friendly graphical programming of the GrowBots on several means: a touch display, a micro:bit, and a remote webserver interface. The GrowBot includes sensors for humidity, CO 2, temperature, water level, RGB camera images, and actuators to control the grow conditions, including full spectrum lights, IR lights, and UV lights, nutrients pump, water pump, air pump, air change pump, and fan. The GrowBot is a tabletop-sized greenhouse automated with sensors and actuators to become a robotic system for the control of plant’s growth. We present the GrowBot as an educational robotic system to facilitate hands-on experimentation with the control of environmental conditions for food plant growth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |