Our design team is comprised of Kiki Brown, Mary Huynh and Carson Sio.
In today’s economy the necessity and popularity of growing your own Victory Garden becomes increasingly important. We’re designing vertical farming for the everyday urbanite by addressing the limitation of urban space. Currently, we’re developing accessible growing systems for the vertical plane which may be integrated during the construction process or post construction for straightforward vertical growing. This project hopes to realize the feasibility of vertical farming on a residential scale.
Unveiling our final solution. Our final model sits nicely on surfaces as well as mounted to the wall. The brackets would ideally be die-cut steel and the boxes would be rotomolded.
These are the changes we’ve made from the previous prototype. It’s now only 2 parts: bracket and container.
A detail of the interior of container.
one bracket supports 2 containers
these are the models that Carson has already posted pictures of. Here’s a lil bit more info on it. There’s basically 3 parts to it: the container, endcaps and brackets. The end caps were the most pivotal piece functioning as the connection piece for each container.
here you can see the inset grooves on the endcap. those grooves are on both sides of each cap.
this is an exploded view that shows how the endcap and container works together.
We’ve made some changes since this model. We scrapped the endcap and made them individual containers instead.
Vertical gardening is so popular right now. Apartment Therapy has been posting a lot about it over the last few months, from wall mounted greenery to tiered planters and window boxes.
I was clicking through Apartment Therapy the other day when I came across this article about a woman, Suzanne Forsling, trying to grow vertically on her home due to space and light constrictions. This woman’s needs and constraints demonstrate the need for our second project, the modular trough. Yes, you can just bolt some gutters or window boxes to your wall, but that doesn’t allow for all types of growing, only of a certain size. Our boxes help the user shift sizes for different types of produce.
Here’s a rendering of our final brackets. We chose to go with a fleur de lis insignia, but conceivably it could be any shape as long as it has the two hooks for hanging the troughs and the tab for mounting in wet mortar.
so this bracket is ready to install on any surface.
and this bracket shows that the tab can be modified to be integrated into any building material, be it brick and mortar or even prefab panels
There’s one more week left before the final crit on May 7th. The whole semester has been a whirlwind, and now we’ve got to think about how we can condense our story into 10 minutes. Needless to say, I’m excited about our group’s path even though it’s meandered throughout the semester. But I don’t think that is necessarily such a bad thing. I see it as a consistent progression our group took while looking at all the angles possible. Yesterday, during our meeting with Andrew, he mentioned that this project, however finished it will be, will still be open to thought and more concepts. I really appreciate that comment because as an aspiring designer, my goal is to provoke and stimulate a dialogue between users and the things around them. I personally hope to never be responsible for something that is considered finished, because where do you go from there?
I love that our group has knocked the notion that vertical farming is an ambitious one. Ironically, our group had too many concepts to choose from; now how often does that happen within a group project?
So after building the models in Mary’s technical drawings, we realized a couple of things. First of all, our project is going in a good direction that could easily become a real product. Our models showed us that our ideas are legitimate, and with a little more development will be a great level for a Junior design project. Our system is now going to have a molded trough, either out of a plastic or sheet metal, capped on the ended with blocks that allow for horizontal modularity. The end caps are the structure that attaches to our wall bracket. The wall bracket right now is in the shape of a fleur de lis, but once we figure out our mounting system this could conceivably be in any form. Our group is real happy with the system we have developed, and we feel that we have addressed almost every issue that has come up.
above are possible sizes for our growing containers. We’re still playing around with the final design of it, but like the idea of having small, medium, and larger options.
