Outcome

Context: 

After a set of fiscally conservative policies followed by a series of ambitious social welfare initiatives were passed, a near-obsolete middle class have taken a bottom-up initiative in times of desperation to showcase their ingenuity, repurposing the past suburbia as envisioned by William Levitt into localized communities. These neighborhoods contain the same underlying physical infrastructure, with the surface repurposed into shared shelters for communal living. These communities have learned to be resilient in the face of abject poverty, along with a new-found sense of shared responsibility and cooperation, as demonstrated by a culture of sharing time, resources and energy into making normalized poverty a little more bearable. Our system of objects are to be implemented in one of these such communities. 

Products:

In a futuristic world, we envision a community in which members of a neighborhood are motivated to share resources, time, and accomplishments with each other. We introduce 3 connected devices which track and encourage neighborhood contributions to a community garden. The first is a plant monitor that tracks who cares for a plant, and what chores were completed (watering, weeding). It publishes tweets to the community twitter to notify neighbors of recent activity as well as activity that needs to be done. The second is a compost bin that similarly posts to Twitter about information relating to the bin (amount of compost, when it needs to be stirred). The information on the Twitter is picked up by the third device, a community scoreboard. The scoreboard is a public display to the whole community about the progress of the garden and contributions to the compost pile. It encourages collaboration and celebration of the sharing of resources and effort.

Centered around community-building, our triptych of objects form a system to support a low cost solution to a long term problem: a community garden.

Prototype Proposals: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Kisrpdyefi_bvr1oHRSRbf0C1ZNDljQvuUUpCbAS9pc/edit#slide=id.g36e09c3582_7_10 (Vision Proposal)

Bill of Materials:

Device 1: Gardening Popsicle Stick

• RFID Scanner
• Push button
• Moisture sensor

Prototype 2: Leaderboard Tree

• Laser-cut acrylic tree
• Acrylic spheres
• LED strips
• Particle Photon

Prototype 3: Compost Monitor

• 1 Ultrasonic Sensor
• 1 Pushbutton
• 100 Ohm Resistor
• Particle Photon

Finished Products:

1) Gardening Popsicle Stick 

2) Compost Monitor

3) Community Scoreboard