Okay, so this is me standing on a mountain in California a couple years ago and basically
what I just want to show here is I've been doing this for a long time, spending time
in the wilderness outdoors and basically this is what's important to me and this is what's
led me to do sustainable design.
I want other people to have experiences like this and have that opportunity so we have
to make good decisions about what we do.
I also spend a lot of time working in restaurants making pizza and working with plants.
There are two different jobs, two different worlds, but it really taught me a lot about
the kind of food I want to eat, the kind of food I think other people should be able
to eat and also how we grow plants, fertilizers, all these different things that we put into
it.
You know, how good is that really for the plant and for us.
So this is food that I make and eat and this is what I think food should be.
It's bright and it's colorful and it's healthy and I know what these ingredients are.
It's not coming out of a box and I don't know how to pronounce any of these things.
I mean this is real good food and I think we should all have access to this kind of food.
So now I'm at Georgia Tech, I'm finishing up my industrial design degree and I'm working
on my thesis and so I wanted to take all of those things that are important to me and
focus them in my project.
So how can we do agriculture better?
How can we grow food in urban environments?
How can we look at sustainability issues in a small way but also talk about the larger
issues that are affecting us?
Food miles is something I'm sure a lot of you have heard about and talked about.
It's really important, it's addressing this issue of local food but that's only one small
part of the problem with industrial agriculture.
There's also a lot of waste of resources in industrial agriculture and there's a lot of
fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, things that we don't necessarily need to eat good
food.
Another issue we're facing is the population is quickly growing.
We're going to be reaching 8 to 10 billion people in the next 50 years which means we're
running out of land to grow food on.
There's less space for us to all have the food that we need.
So how do we address this issue?
Most of these people in the next 50 years, this large population are going to be living
in urban centers.
Urban areas are great but there's not a lot of room for growing food.
How do we maximize this space so that we can grow food that's local and healthy and good
for us?
And I think the way to do that is to go vertical, to start growing food vertically.
So there's a lot of great concepts out there right now, sort of on this large architectural
scale for growing food in what are called farm scrapers.
So I want to take a lot of those same principles for growing food in that way and bring it
down to a smaller in-home scale so we can be growing food in schools or hospitals or
in your own home.
So to do that I started looking at what's already out there, what kind of products are
used for growing food at home.
And all of these have benefits, some of them are kind of large for if you're living in
a small apartment in New York or San Francisco, it's going to be hard to fit this in your
home or growing plants is so amazing and magical, why are you going to hide all that magic behind
a white plastic box?
So I'm also interested in engaging the user in growing food.
So how can I create something that gets people engaged in the process of taking care of plants
and then getting them to think about the food that they eat and the choices they make and
maybe thinking about the other choices they make in their life that affect their health
or the environment.
I also believe in art.
I think art is really important and I think that it's impactful and if it's beautiful
it can really stick with you and it creates a memory for you that you take with you and
affects the decisions that you make down the road and along the way.
So I want what I'm designing to also have that really beautiful aesthetic value.
So now I know I'm going to work on a vertical farm, I've got to figure out how I'm going
to do that.
So there's all different ways to grow food but I went with hydroponics because it's
the most efficient way to grow food indoors, it's 70% more efficient in terms of water
use than soil, it's a lot easier to keep nutrients in the water than it is with soil.
So the next thing I wanted to do is I needed to go out and get some plants, I needed to
start growing food and figuring some of these things out.
So I went out to Farmer D's which he actually spoke here a few months ago and they have
tons of great stuff, there are lots of great plants, lots of good people working there
with tons of good advice so I really recommend going and checking it out.
So this is my first working prototype.
This design is actually based on a project done by some people up in Brooklyn called
Window Farms and basically I built this system because I wanted to learn how hydroponic systems
work, I've never built one before, I don't know what components I need, how does everything
fit together so I needed to just learn about the functionality.
What's cool about hydroponics is basically instead of using soil you use some other sort
of substrate that the plants are growing in so these are baked clay pellets that retain
moisture for the roots to grow in so the roots can just sort of grow in and out of these
pellets here and then you don't have to use the soil.
So even though this system is working really well for me I'm thinking maybe there's some
other things that I can do to improve on this system.
If I'm going to talk about sustainability, why is everything growing in plastic, how
can we move beyond plastic and have other materials, there are also a lot of components
here and it took a lot of time to put together so how can we make it easier for people.
So during my research I came across people using felt to grow all kinds of different
plants in for indoor use and outdoor use but nobody was really using felt for hydroponics
so I decided maybe that can replace the plastic in these systems so I started building prototypes
and testing how the water flowed through the system and it actually works really great.
The water comes down through the felt, it gets to the roots, I'm using the same clay
pellets but instead of having them in a little plastic basket they're just straight into
the felt and then the water just runs through the felt and goes back down into the system
and gets cycled back in.
So this is some of the stuff I harvested from my farm.
From my studio, yeah so it tastes great, it's really good, I encourage you to go out and
grow food whatever way works best for you and this is my blog so if you want to learn
more please check it out and keep growing food.
