Verti-Grow Garden consists of a PVC pipe that has been molded to hold plant pods, a laser cut acrylic water tank, laser cut wooden housing for the tank, 3D printed cap, plasma cut drain to disperse the water at the top, as well as a water pump and hose that run through the tower bringing the water to the top.
Hydroponic planters can be very expensive and also look quite ugly. They can also be extremely hard to make. Verti-Grow Garden tackles this problem by
During my user testing, I asked the following questions:
1. What do you think this is for?
2. What would you change aesthetically?
3. What would you change about the function?
4. How would you turn it on?
From the questions I discovered:
1. Two users knew that it was for growing plants, and two users had never seen anything like it and didn't know what it was for. When I investigated further, the users that didn't know what it was for had never grown plants before nor had the desire to.
2. Most users suggested that the pods be able to be set in farther into the pipe. Which would allow the plants to get more water. Others also suggested that the base of the tower have some sort of design indicating that it was a planter.
3. I had two users suggest that the base and the water tank be one piece so that if you had to take it apart, they would easily go back together. Another user suggested that there be an on and off switch, and the other suggested a way to see when the water in the tank was full or starting to get low.
4. Three users plugged in the device to turn it on, and one looked for an on button before discovering there was a cord to plug in.
Above is the original sketch I made of Verti-Grow Garden. I kept with the same idea that I had planned out, but made some minor adjustments to the sizes. For instance instead of a box that was 5.5" x 3.5" x 4" I designed my box to be 4.5" x 4.5" x 5", and I made the tower to have a diameter of 3" instead of the initial 2".
Above is the foamcore prototype of Verti-Grow Garden. This prototype shows how the project will look. I used a pvc pipe to represent the tower and made a box out of foamcore that would be large enough to hold the water tank and components of the project.
The next part of the project was the function. As you can see, I decided to continue the use of the PVC pipe, as I believed the tower would take too long and too much material to print. I created the acrylic base that holds the water and the water pump. A small hose runs through to the top of the tower and pushes water through the tower and back into the system.
The next part of this prototype was the form. This is the part of the process where I laser cut the base, sanded and molded the PVC pipe, as well as added a cap and the pods to the plant. This part of the process did not include any function and only represented the actual structure of Verti-Grow Garden.
Above is the finished working product that will allow you to grow multiple plants at once. I designed the base to be green and the tower to be grey as to have a more earthy look to it. All you simply have to do is add some seeds to the pods, add nutrients to the water, fill it up and turn it on. You'll only have to refill the water about every 2 weeks and this saves a lot of time and wasted water as opposed go if the plants were grown in the ground.
