inSoil Case Study
A speculative design of a soil reader that instantly provides a detailed analysis of the health of compost and soil, while providing a list of recommended nutrients for this soil to nurture plants and other cohabitants.
Before the start of each academic year, the incoming cohorts of the Master of Human Computer Interaction+ Design program come together on campus for the first time during a 5-day immersion. This is the moment that students meet the classmates that they will be working and designing with for the next 11 months. Once introductions have been met, the students conduct an intense design sprint. In these 5 days, the cohort get a crash course in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the mornings and then applies this logic to a problem space in the afternoon. It is challenging under all normal circumstances but we faced an additional challenge of doing the immersion virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Team
Nathaniel Gray, Alara Hakki, Alice Zheng
The Challenge
Our team was asked to examine post-humanism in HCI by exploring ways of using technology to further harmonious cohabitation between human and nonhuman agents. We decided to focus our design response on nutrients that are lost to food waste. More specifically, we focused on how to better inform humans of their interactions with the nonhuman agents in the food waste cycle such as the food itself and the creatures that live off of food waste.
Formative Research
We narrowed our possible problem spaces to food waste. We used secondary and primary research methods to learn more about this problem space.
Secondary Research Methods
- Literature Review
- Competitive Analysis
We focused our secondary research food waste, repurposing and upcycling of food waste, and composting.
Primary Research Methods
- Online Survey
- Interviews
We sent out a general survey to classmates and friends to learn more about their food waste and composting habits. Additionally, we interviewed a few people who compost and garden.
Research Insights
- Individuals lack incentive and information on the importance and benefits of composting food waste. Many cities have not implemented systems for composting food waste in public spaces nor in individual households.
- Composting food waste can benefit non-human agents such as wildlife animals, forests and soil by limiting the amount of chemical fertilizers used. Composting can contribute to mindful and harmonious cohabitation over time.
- Food waste can be upcycled into an edible byproduct or composted with non-human actors such as worms and fungi.
- Individuals’ lack of living space and effort to create a biodiverse living environment are barriers in cities.
With these insights in mind, we found a problem space of interest and formulated the following problem statement:
How might we utilize the nutritional value that is still present in food waste for both human and non-human agents?
Ideation
After having settled on this How Might We statement, our team took the night to sketch 10 ideas each for a total of 30 design concepts to address our question. Our collective ideas run the gamut from sci-fi speculation to practical and plausible.
With all these concepts drawn out, we then needed to down select. So, we affinity grouped our like-minded solutions and from there selected four ideas that we thought best addressed our problem space.
Concept 1: Food Recycler — A food waste device that receives food waste and converts it to a nutritious food by-product and composts the remaining waste.
Concept 2: Smart Fridge — Refrigerator that has the ability to scan food that is in the fridge, providing information on the food’s life span and most efficient compost option. This fridge is also able to process the compost.
Concept 3: Grocery Subscription — A reward system that can encourage users to stay conscious about what they are buying and trashing.
Concept 4: Home Garden Potter — A garden planter that converts small amount of waste into soil and gives an opportunity to compost for people who don’t normally compost due to lack of space.
For our final design, we decided to combine components of our four concepts into a single speculative design. Our final design, inSoil, is a gardening and composting assistant that reads the conditions of soil and sends a detailed analysis to a mobile application.
How it works
There are two necessary components to inSoil: the soil reader and the user’s mobile device with the corresponding inSoil application.
The soil reader simply needs to be charged, turned on and connected to an user’s phone via a Bluetooth connection. Once connected, the mobile app will indicate that the reader is synced and a light will indicate that it is ready to analyze. The mobile app will then request information on the type of soil it will analyze. Once the user has indicated the type of soil, the device can be inserted into soil or compost. The reader will then indicate when it is done analyzing and the mobile application will confirm that it is analyzing the information. Once complete, the mobile app will provide a visualization of the soil data and educate the user on how to best care for the soil, the plant, and any cohabitants.
This tool can help indoor plant enthusiasts, outdoor gardeners, and farmers. It can inform participants about how to best care for plants and other inhabitants of the soil and how to best maintain a sustainable food waste cycle. This tool has benefits for humans and non-humans alike.
Benefits:
Human:
- Awareness and education
- Ease of care
- Instant response of plants needs
Non-human:
- Nutrition tailored to each plant
- Informs user of plants need
- Reduction in use of chemical fertilizers
Prototype
We created two prototypes to test this design’s functionality: an application wireframe and a video prototype. Due to the limitations of doing this design sprint remotely, we decided to create prototypes that could be experienced from the comforts of anyone’s home. So, we tested our prototype on our fellow classmates and a few friends.
Testing
One of our takeaways from testing was that it was not very informative to test a gardening tool on people that do not garden or own plants. The feedback from gardeners and plant owners was far and above the most beneficial.
Our video prototype allowed people to imagine being the user of this tool. The video format, however, limited the quality of feedback we could have received had we presented our prototype in a more interactive format.
Further Improvement
If given the opportunity, we would improve our study in the following ways:
Refine our prototype based on feedback. We heard great feedback on how this product could better assist users that we hadn’t considered during our design process. With more time and with these insights, we would refine the design of the soil reader to be a stand-alone tool without the need for a phone.
Conduct more user testing and research. There is so much to learn about this subject matter that I could have taken an entire course on it and still feel that need to conduct more research on this topic. So with more time, I would extensively research soil and compost health, the types of soil testing currently in the market, and the best ways to design an instrument for this use.
Explore more playful features. Since we are speculating a design that allows a user to better understand the soil of their plant, I would want to push this design further to incorporate ways to inform them about temperature, moisture, and other possible issues that could help them with gardening and composting. Whether with fun animations or gamification, I would want to incorporate more playful and positive feedback for the user to encourage them to continue their gardening or composting habits.
Takeaways
The more you share your ideas and concepts, the better the design becomes. With each person that we presented, more interesting possibilities for our product came to mind. We noticed that we could make simple changes to our prototype that could make our application design easier to understand and improve our overall concept.
The scope of the food waste problem is larger than any one solution. There isn’t a single idea or design that will solve the wicked problems the world faces. By looking at the wide picture of how destructive this problem space is to the world, it was hard to imagine how small design improvements could defeat this extinction level event that we face. However, the first step to a better world is to imagine it.
Be willing to go into unexpected territory. The path to our design solution was not the most direct. By diving into the food waste problem, we ended up crafting a gardening tool. It was the conversations that we had, the research we conducted and the particular area of the problem space we decided to focus on (composting) that led us to this unexpected solution.
It was eye opening to explore non-human centered perspectives. Spending a week during this pandemic focusing on post-humanism in HCI and how to design a better world for all creatures we live with will alter my design decisions going forward.
