Just when we thought we had refined our ideas about the growBot Symposium, we realize we have to get even more specific. Roles are being divided based on the many tasks we must fulfill, and we are full speed ahead until the end of the semester. 03.29 we had industrial design grad student Karen Mackay join us and speak to us about her master’s thesis in vertical farming. 04.01 we delved into more of the specifics of our activities, a subject that continued into 04.02.

Meeting Notes 03.29.2010

Karen Mackay

• problem: not enough farmland to feed people
• food miles … why can’t we reduce?
• disruptive products – how can we enact change/learning?

• project: mini ecosystem
• examination of hydroponics, aeroponics, soil substrate
• sources: window farms (brooklyn), science barge, valcent, epcot (good example)
• looking at affordable, modular, scalable
• can set up hydroponics to grow chard, beets, tomatoes
• her projects part functional, part beautiful
• tumblr
• worms to compost (from farmer D)
• planting: net cups used to hold ceramic balls, which retain moisture, lend to reuse
• felt prototypes – could this be a container instead of heavy plastic?
• project set up in architecture building (2nd floor; she urges us to stop by)
• daylight spectrum LEDs for lights
• kale, bok choy, swiss chard
• water bottle + pellets or soil or pellets and air
• all about taking parts that already exist and put it together. Window farm is awesome, but it’s a lot of work than a lot of time. Not accessable to people who don’t necessarily get into that. Simplifying process, but allowing room to get involved

questions:

• what are you going to do with regards to aethetics? - looking at felt + glass, currently testing felt pockets; next iteration to have more transparency; also looking to infuse glass, maybe one long unit with many glass pockets
• ID requirement: can’t do 1-off design; has to be manufactured-ready … what will final product be? Something repeatable. Maybe DIY – kit? Maybe instructables?
• where does felt come from? being bought (not made). From smart pots; large bags of felt. Any kind of wool felt would work. Maybe look into repurposing old sweaters
• final documentation? instructable (if DIY), if kit, then something else. If glass, then here’s what it is and how you install it.
• most bizarre substrate you’ve encountered? some people use styrofoam for vertical stacking systems
• do you plant seeds, or do your plants start with plants? they start with small plants. If starting with seeds, maybe start paper towel, get roots, then add.
• what are you doing after graduation? would like to work in sustainability. wants to find balance with doing art.

Lots of things that could get to the details. maybe get sensors. maybe series reflectors. maybe photoresisters.

How Karen describes her project … we need some sort of learning in the process. Aesthetics are part of the project.

“Before you can have social shift, you have to create a social mood that is willing to accept that kind of shift.” -Jane Bennett (political theorist from john hopkins)

Aesthetics: way to engage and get people involved in that conversation.

Carl’s feedback:

• Diagrams!! help to tell the story
• whenever you see a problem in gardening, ask How could I sense this? computers have built-in cameras, use that to get pixel value.
• we have a tendency to anthropomorphise. consider the intention of the photoresistor.
• Latour would say: we don’t need to think about intention (or thinking) of object.
• tendency to antropomorphise: “felt lets the plants know when to stop growing” one could say that the felt and the plant are in some sort of exchange. now it’s time to stop growing. air is mediated through felt. but that’s not an affordance that was built into the felt, but we are aware of it NOW.
• doesn’t matter what the sidewalk looks like to the computer, but it matters what it looks like to the robot
• is it possible to think of the world outside of ourselves?

Pelle Ehn’s Design Things

• person = a thing that has objectives, it extends “thing”
• public controversial things
• future of farm – brought up controversial issues

• what is the thing-ness of the farm?
• n defines thing of humans and non-humans

Collective language

think of objects, and not just people

• think about the felt
• we are to look at this from a perspective of doing design work
• we focus too much on people; WE SHOULD BE DESIGNING FOR PLANTS

Astrolabe

• Advent of portugese shipping
• John Law, writes about astrolabe
• what was the network of things in order to make this come into play? had to do with STARS
• cannot make astrolabe w/o stars
• so…what is the collective of things that go into farm and robot contexts, and how are we designing for them?

farm collective includes soil, water, light
// sensors also detect these things

notion that language is a type of object that is more transformative

ALL OBJECTS ARE THE SAME; thinking otherwise invariably leads to mistreatment of people

so … what are we reporting on? when we talk about a product working, we’re doing that thing a disservice.

people who have companion animals have different relationship with those animals than some people

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NATURAL

Cheese gets made because of the context of the place in which cheese is made.

how do we describe this collective? what is the role of the designer in forming this collective?

What if, for workshop, we started by having people think about DESIGNING FOR THE PLANT?

who are the actors involved in this who are not human?

nowhere in history of Pasteur is the account of the cows, which are a necessary part of the

• context of use
• object of design
• designer has to be neutral // but there’s no such thing as neutral

pre-1990′s: no discussion of objects in sociology or anthropology. what if we treated them symmetrically? (latour)

user research got us the escalade

Event

[SEE HANDOUT FOR ROLE DETAILS]

Meeting Notes 03.30.2010

What does it mean to design a compelling making activity, and a compelling made thing? Mature, reused materials. And some constraints. And objects of meaningful representation.

Meeting Notes 04.01.2010

CDC may be interested in maybe doing exhibit with growBots

Morning activities [see handout for more detail]

• Carl – overview
• Anna and Vasudhara – 2 + 3
• no camera, submit photos
• if we do this soon, we can take gigapan and take a panorama
• need questions that will connect 2 and 3
• Brainstorming: groups or 1 big group?
• talk with Lodato about hands-on activity

Workflow

• Anna to give Bullets to Laura. Also, what is the handout? Give that info to Laura, who will formulate copy
• cc Carl on all text-related stuff
• by 19th, list of materials
• same info flow for Afternoon activities

Laura: responsible for final copy

Need to combine hands-on + prototyping
Need to coordinate morning with afternoon

We do not want to overwhelm our participants

Documentation posters

• structured grid
• 4 big questions
• combination of a + b // 1-liners of text

Delisha: postcard

Desired: experiential learning

Puddle: How would a robot know not to walk here?

Meeting Notes 04.02.2010

We talked for a long time about Activity #3, where people are supposed to think about their farm and the needs that may occur there. The question of mapping and representation kept coming up…how could we visually, actively engage our participants in a context-specific, yet shared space? Vasudhara came up with the idea of a large farm where people could create plots or settings that represents their farm.

Everyone seems excited, considering it’s 4 p.m. on a Friday.

We’ll have another meeting this weekend, which should hopefully seal the deal. Or at least provide us with the basis of what we’ll be doing.

April 4th, 2010
Topic: Day in the Life, Research Log, growbot Project Documentation Tags: None

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