ENGD240

Grea Plant Tower

CAD render of tower assembly.

The ENGD Studio 5 course has students participate in the 'Dyson Grand Challenges', a system of suggestions for the probable most impactful avenues of advancement through STEM innovation in the 21st century. I joined a student group forming around the axiom of sustainability. One student, following an experience assisting in developing irrigation systems for agricultural municipalities, suggested creating something in line with that past work suitable for city dwellers. Armed with the team name 'Grea', something we adopted from a misspelling in communications with a professor, we embarked on our journey of attempting to bring the concept to life.

Prior experiences of group members and further research incidated that hydroponic gardening might be the field to innovate on. Hydroponic gardens are efficient, utilizing less water than conventional gardens, and low-maintanence, generally relying only on water level monitoring. Additionally, they provide advantages to the user versus traditional soil agriculture with regard to mess and weight.

Through a process of elimination employing strategies like house of quality analysis and market research, we discovered that there was no indoor hydroponic gardening product capable of sustaining the growth of many food plants of different needs and configurations, and that all of them, aside from some bucket-and-pump configuration systems, cost well over 100 USD. Most vertical hydroponic off-the-shelf systems we found were listed at proces over 1000 USD.

We felt this presented an interesting opportunity: the development of an affordable hydroponic system for low-maintanance, accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and quiet plant growth.

Two layers of the plant tower growing bean sprouts.

Following conceptualization, the team preformed rigorous iterative prototyping and user testing. Feedback was assembled from other students, community volunteers living in space-restricted environments, and online respondents. Feedback was collected regarding the accessibility of assembly instructions, perspectives on aesthetics, and the visibility of the light indicators attached to the optional water and fertilizer monitoring system.

A fully assembled plant tower.

The final result was a novel hydroponic system with an appealing form factor, a final cost of less than 100 USD, plenty of accomodation for the growth of plants, excellent documentation, and a modality so simple anyone can grow their own food. The files for 3D printing your own plant tower, the embedded codebase, and assembly documentation is accessible via the team's GitHub repository.