Garden

Fresh

Home

An in-home growing unit for underserved families, to give them expanded access to gardening and fresh produce. The Garden Fresh home unit augments the urban diet through both education and engagement with growing in the home. This project is also related to the mentorship of beginning designers, and a focus on the home as a base for urban families to develop health-oriented solutions within urban substandard housing and housing insecurity issues in the US.

A transdisciplinary project, the PATENT PENDING HOME GARDENING SMART VASE Garden Fresh Home (GFH) is a biophilic and food production project comprised of a proprietary indoor hydroponic plant growth system to grow vegetables and fruits inside the home. It is driven by microbiologist Dr. Shivanthi Anandan and Architect/Design Researcher D.S. Nicholas, along with Design Research graduate research assistants and STAR scholars from both STEM and Design disciplines. This patent-pending unit will provide easier access to produce for families, which will help create a green habit in the home. This design is driven by bench science research and iterative consideration of the substandard living conditions in urban living spaces that lack such access. Viability assessment for this project is based on the WELL Building Recommendation for FreshProduce access and bio-lab experiments are underway around nutrient levels and production.

The plant growth in our hydroponic unit is sustained through a proprietary organic bio-mix that we have developed in Dr. Anandan’s lab specifically through our iterative design process. We have received funding to support several ongoing studies to determine the efficacy of the bio-mix and to continue to iterate forms that encourage both plant and mix. In an early study, the group was able to validate the bio-mix in tap water in the hydroponics system, rather than in the special nutrient medium normally used to culture them in the laboratory, thus making the system a very user-friendly one for the household. Empirical study has included integrating bench science into the process of designing and developing the smart vase hydroponic system. Consequently, as the group designs and tests the prototypes in the laboratory we continue to test for successful algal growth, successful plant growth, and how these can influence container aesthetic. We are exploring the ergonomic ease of using the system. These data are converging into a series of bench science studies that are currently underway. Ultimately the system will be validated through in-home placement and measurement of plant yield.

More Detail: recent highlights

PATENT:

*Anandan, S., & Nicholas, D. S. (2020). An urban in-home system for growing fruits and vegetables (World IntellectualProperty Organization Patent No. WO2020028463A1). https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020028463A1/en?oq=pct%2fUS2019%2f044281

CURRENT FUNDING

$100,000 Drexel Ventures Fund; 50/50 Effort Split -- Garden FreshHome: Co-Principal Investigator with Shivanthi Anandan Co-Principal Investigator; Venture Funding for Market DevelopmentGarden Fresh Home In-home Hydroponic Unit

National Science Foundation I-CORPS Local Participants: in 2019 the project principals were selected for the NSF I Corps Short Course in which we worked to develop the current prototypes through the initial market research validation process. Feedback from community discussions and from potential customers has validated the need for such a device and the utilization of a 100% organic method for growing plants in the home.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

The conference proceedings papers are a space for us to showcase and discuss the methods and progress made on the project in the earlier days of our collaborative practice and more recently. In addition, the papers became an arena to discuss and clearly develop the ethos of the project in terms of both equity and health. The SDEWES paper documents in part our entrepreneurial findings and the development of the value proposition for the Garden Fresh Home Smart Vase.

*Nicholas, D., Anandan, S. (2020). Garden fresh home: Sustainable food production for urban families. Sustainable Development of Energy Water and EnvironmentSystems (SDEWES): First Asia Pacific conference proceedings, 009201-009209. A top ten most viewed presentation at the digital conference.

https://www.goldcoast2020.sdewes.org/(DOI and Journal forthcoming)

*Nicholas, D., Krespan, E., & Anandan, S. (2017). Mind as a thing, Redoing the iterative in design education. REDO Cumulus Conference Proceedings, 99–106

https://www.designskolenkolding.dk/en/publications/redo-cumulus-conference-proceedings

STUDENT MENTORSHIP

During the research and deep dive process described for the innovation of the “smart vase”, we have included undergraduate and graduate students as part of the research team. This process illuminates for them how such large and worldwide problems require the knowledge and practices from several disciplines, not just one. Our process broadens their understanding of the value of trans-disciplinary work, and how critical it is in the 21st century. Graduate students in Health, STEM, Fashion, and Design Research include Elise Krespan, Thelmelis Abreu, and Nicole Feller-Johnson. Star Scholars and Research Co-ops from 2015-2020 are listed on my CV along with the graduate research assistants.

Interiors Graduate students have been a valuable part of our early work and future directions for this project. They collaborated with us on larger-scale explorations and facade ideas based on vernacular home typologies. We seek to one day integrate our growing technology into the building structure. Modular facade options are of interest and several were sketched for us by Graduate Interiors students Rita Truoncgao, Raja Al Nasrullah, and Amir Sedeghi in 2015 and 2016. Amir’s visualizations are shown on this page. The lab plans to revisit these options in the future.