GreenLYFE: Creating thriving communities through the love of growing your own food • FINAL Presentation

December 11, 2018 / Designing Innovation, GreenLYFE / nicole

GreenLYFE: Creating thriving communities through the love of growing your own food

For our third project, Juniette and I decided to continue working on GreenLYFE. We have decided to work on this together for our Capstone project and really develop this App because we see a tremendous opportunity for it to grow and expand while doing something good for our communities.

Here is our Final Presentation:

PROBLEM

Currently, information about sustainable food sources is spread out and there is not an “all-in-one” place to learn or communicate with like-minded individuals who are also interested in building community gardens and food forests through permaculture, aquaponics, and other methods.

OBJECTIVE

GreenLYFE will connect like-minded individuals who are interested in sustainable living through community, permaculture, sustainable growing, aquaponics, and so forth.

Unique Advantage: GreenLYFE would educate, connect people with different skill levels so they can work together, provide distribution of harvests (CSA) from different community gardens. GreenLYFE will be an all in one.

The main goals of this project are:

To bring people together who want to be sustainable in their food sources
To educate people about growing their own food
To build a community
To find the nearest community garden locations
To provide volunteer opportunities

STAKEHOLDERS

All of our key stakeholders have interest in empowering people to grow their own food and are health conscious. Some of them incorporate this interest into their hobbies while others through their work. We interviewed nine stakeholders:

Permaculture System Designer
Nutritionist and Permaculture System Designer for Schools
Farmer/Owner of Finca el Josco Bravo
Two Home Gardeners
Student Majoring in Nutrition
Vegetarian
Aquaponics Gardener
Garden Club Volunteer
- Stakeholder Mapping
- Carolina, Emiliano & Jade Mar • Permaculture Designers
- Suley Angelica, Farmer
- Farm El Josco Bravo – Puerto Rico • Organic Farm

FINDINGS

PROS of Community Gardens and Food Forests:

Offering a place for amateurs to learn from and communicate with masters
Connecting with neighbors in real life
Helping to feed low-income community members
Helping the homeless by providing food, shelter, and education to those who choose to help themselves by helping the local community
Creating abundance of food in food deserts
Connection to the earth
Distribution of work among community members instead of one person
Sharing knowledge
Job opportunities

Challenges:

Physical space
Lack of knowledge
Overwhelmed with where to find information
Weather
Local ordinances and zoning
Nosy or controlling neighbors
Homeowners Association (HOA)
Lack of materials, resources, and funding
Initial investment when starting a food garden
Budget
Getting the word out through Social Media / marketing
Shortage of support / volunteers
Communication methods

App Features Wish List • Interviewees felt the following features would benefit the app:

Ability to find a nearby garden or fellow gardeners
Volunteer/job opportunities
Tool and materials swap
Database for pests and common plant conditions
Ability to message other users and plan a meetup
Ability to input fruit trees and edible plant identification in your city
Grow charts for different zones
Information on companion plants
Educational courses about gardening, nutrition, etc
Workshop schedules
Ask the Experts option
Competition about gardening
Online gardening socializing games
Ability to schedule tasks so people can coordinate garden care/maintenance
Event Notifications

EMPATHY MAPPING & PERSONAS

We did an in-class exercise called Empathy Mapping. For this exercise, we took ideas from our interviews to create a map to be able to understand the attitudes and behaviors of our users in a deeper level. Empathy mapping also helps reveal the holes in our user data.

Empathy Mapping: A collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making.

Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking —Nielsen Norman Group

The traditional empathy map is split between 4 quadrants:

(What the user Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels) with the user or persona in the middle.

PERSONAS

Personas are fictitious yet realistic representations of our target audience. From the persona profiles, we can create user scenarios, feature generation and feature prioritization. Personas become meaningful and creates user empathy among the development team to ensure the user is always the focus of all efforts.

Here are our personas:

Jane • College Student, Single
Robert • Father, Married
Sharon • Retired Professor, Married

USER SCENARIOS (CONTEXT SCENARIOS)

Scenarios or stories about the ideal user experiences explain how the product fits into each persona’s life and environment, and how it helps them achieve their goals. You should have at least a couple scenarios for each persona.

Scenario 1 Creating a New Community Garden

Scenario • Robert, Creating a new Community Garden

Robert on phone looking for gardens in his area using GPS Locator
He doesn’t find any so he starts his own garden (START YOUR OWN button)
Robert receives MESSAGES from interested members
He creates a CHECKLIST of what they need to start (supplies, seeds, etc)
He also creates a list of TASKS for each member to complete.
CREATE AN EVENT to launch the garden.

Scenario 2: Plant Identifier

Jane receives a plant for her mom
Uses PLANT IDENTIFIER to find out what it is and how to care for it.
She uploads and share a picture of it with the other users
A user points out in a comment that her plant has spots and bugs
She uses the search function in the DISEASE AND PEST ENCYCLOPEDIAS to find proper care for the issue
Jane creates a reminder to water and feed her plant proper nutrients.

Scenario 3 Volunteering Opportunity

Scenario • Sharon, Volunteering Opportunity

Sharon has a lot of free time and uses the GPS function to find local volunteer opportunities
She finds a local permaculture garden in need of volunteers
She marks herself on the app as an interested volunteer
She marks on the app that she is an expert in permaculture and available to give workshops
She receives a message from the group saying she has been accepted and sees the garden’s wishlist
She marks off supplies that she can donate to the garden

REQUIREMENTS (DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS) • Key Elements

Some of the Requirements are: