GREEN UP

Investigation project. Smart gardens that are able to collect information about a plant and project it to the user.
2018. Barcelona.

Could we modify the typical home garden to make it more interactive and social? Plants,and permaculture naturally produce data and information. Could we capture that information, translate it, and broadcast it to the public space?

GreenUp is an integrated planter box for your balcony which is also a basic computer. It captures data from the user and the plants and displays it on an LED screen, which is visible from the street below. Using an Arduino board and various sensors, one can easily program the LED to display a variety of information such as: moisture of the soil, size of the plant, time until harvest, the type of plant, even the money that the user has saved by growing their own food.

GreenUp does not attempt to radically transform the existing economic model, merely to diversify it. Every community will have a richer source of food, including the individual GreenUp planters, the urban gardens, the supermercats ... Furthermore, the concept of using a basic computer to collect your own data can apply to almost any activity which has private and public faces (like laundry, dog-walking, or political protests). These practices can also be translated into information which is displayed from a residence down to the street. Ultimately, the street itself becomes like a screen filled with pixels of information, each of which encourage people to interact and look further into them.

For a city to be composed of healthy communities, it is important that technology does not have all the answers, and that people be allowed to seek and create their connections themselves.