Q: Do you actually design robots? A: No, at least, not yet. Q: So, then, what do you design? At its core, the growBot Garden project is all about constructing events that bring together local small-scale farmers and other food producers, designers, artists, engineers, and others who are interested in the future of sustainable agriculture, [...]

Last Fall (2009) our Public Design Workshop project studio was focused on the topic of speculative robotics. In that studio, Laura conceived of the growBot Garden project as a series of creative conversations that would bring together local small-scale farmers and designers to explore how robotics technology might be applied to support sustainable organic agriculture. [...]

Thanks to recent graduate Karen MacKay, who is apparently as generous as she is talented, the growBot lab is now home to her modular hydroponic vertical farm, equipped with water bottles modded to hold planters, ceramic beads, and a cyclical water reservoir. The farm was used for her award-winning master’s project, so you can imagine [...]

This past Monday was our long-awaited growBot Symposium, a day-long workshop which brought together a diverse group of farmers, producers, and other growing-minded individuals to learn the basics of robotics and build imaginative robotic prototypes. The event turned out wonderfully (despite being rained out of our original space), and everyone got to stretch their imaginations, [...]

Over this weekend, I spent quite a bit of time building prototypes to try to figure out what materials work best. Since repurposed materials are desired (they articulate our message of sustainability), I put myself through a little experiment where I created the same idea using materials gathered from my house and materials gathered in [...]

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 [...]

Monday’s meeting delved further into the agenda of our upcoming design workshop, ending with the beginnings of a discussion about a paper by Pelle Ehn. I didn’t take any pictures, but there are a lot of notes below.

The past few weeks have been centered around figuring out the who, what, when, where and why for our upcoming participatory design workshop. Monday 3.01 we had an on-the-spot brainstorming session about what kind of workshop activity we could do, and then Monday 3.08 we were handed the assignment of figuring out exactly what we [...]

Monday was our first meeting after GA Organics, and we had a lot to talk about – how the conference went, what we learned from the community, the people we spoke with. We also had a guest visitor – Barbara Stafford, who has a stint with us beginning in the fall. Lady Rogue brought a [...]

In order to get a better sense (pun intended! ha-ha) of the robotics world, I read A test bed for insect-inspired robotic control by Michael Reiser and Michael Dickinson (2003). Glancing through robotics articles, this one stuck out to me immediately as intriguing (insects + robots? huh?) and potentially relevant (insects + agriculture seem to [...]