topic: Smart Rainy Pot —— An innovative design
“Have you ever wondered why URBAN FARMING TECHNOLOGY has not been widely promoted? What do you think are the limitations of urban farming？”
The industry of farming is very simple because water + sunlight + temperature + soil + time = plants and fruits. But HOWEVER farming is not as simple as it seems because it is only possible when all the above variables, parameters are in a just right interval. So we can understand that plantation industry belongs to the category of uncomplicated but not easy to get started. Then it is obvious: the simplest and most direct measure that helps to promote urban farming is simplify the whole industy or educate our people.
But, how? Who?
Children.
We all know that children are extremely malleable, they are fully curious as well as strong enough to accept new things, making them the most suitable group for our target. "To make a product that can be accepted and loved by every family, to expose their children to this product from an early age, and to let our product change the way they think about agriculture, like and try to grow." This became my original intention in designing this planter and the inspiration for my project.
So I want to make my product as "practicality interactivity and fun" as possible.
In my first draft, I wanted to see if I could design a system that could be completed without external energy (electricity) supply. One of the most important points is how to guide water from a low place to a high place without using a water pump. I once thought of the siphon effect and the capillary effect. If water could be directed to a high place through a siphon, and then artificially flowed to a low place through a switch, the plants would be irrigated while flowing. Ideally, this would be the perfect situation if the amount of water the siphon diverts in a day just matches the amount needed for a single irrigation. But after understanding it, I found that the application in this area is very unrealistic.
So I started to change my thinking, but the idea of a shower head was the design that I kept from the very beginning until the very end. Because more and more systems now use drip irrigation or other irrigation systems to save water, sprinkler irrigation is used less and less, but sprinkler irrigation is indeed the lowest-cost and most interactive irrigation method. The water droplets falling down drop by drop are like simulating rain in real life, which is very appropriate. So I simply designed the shape of the shower head to look like a cloud. Since we mentioned the weather, we also thought of the sun, so we planned to design the shape of the LED lights to look like the sun.
But then I realized that there was something unreasonable about the design, which was shaped like a 3D printer with a redundant wrapping around it, which was not only unsightly but also blocked the light and affected the growth of the plant, and that indirectly prompted me to draw the final draft.
