Introduction
At the end of the last milestone, we created three ideas worth consideration: Plants That Talk, WatAR (an automated watering system) and Critter Shield. Following these ideas, we pivoted toward conducting user enactments in order to test the boundaries of certain design decisions. The goal then of our user enactments (UEs) was not to evaluate the design concepts which we created in the initial brainstorming and ideation phases but to explore the realm of nuances of the project which the users found helpful and features they did not particularly like in the way it was designed. Conducting this exercise with multiple people allowed us to collect data and synthesize it into insights across a broad perspective without focusing in on any particular user. We were better able to study the social tensions that revolved around the concept of automation and participants' comfort levels with varying degrees of automation. Another design space which we wanted to gain a deep understanding of was that of amount of information presented to the users. UEs allowed us to observe the user’s reactions to various amounts of information and frequency of communication. We will discuss our findings over the next few sections.
Study design
Research Questions:
User Enactment Overview:
- We want to test the boundaries of system automation and proactivity in order to assess how comfortable individuals are with a system taking care of certain tasks. More specifically:
- Would high levels of automatization interfere with user values of ownership and connection to nature?
- Would users be more comfortable tending to their gardens themselves or would they be more comfortable having a system do those tasks for them?
- How much automation are users comfortable with regarding the watering?
- When does information about the plant health levels become excessive? Conversely, when might it not be enough?
- Frequency of information (what volume of information might be excessive or too minimal?)
- Level of detail vs abstractness of information
- Direct notifications vs available to check
- Level of user work vs. their want for involvement in the tasks of gardening
- Are users comfortable with tamagatchification of their garden (representing it as an animated character / creature)?
- How comfortable are users with digital interactions with their physical garden?
User Enactment Overview:
- UEs created:
- User receives a notification on their phone that they have a daily report of their garden available to view. The user selects this notification and is directed to a screen containing extremely detailed information about their garden, including water levels, pH levels and nutritional levels.
- User goes to their garden and there exists a blinking light next to plants that communication information about the status of the plant to the user.
- User can watch the video of FarmBot (farmbot.io) and the research team will ask the user to reflect on their comfort with this level of automation with their garden. https://farmbot.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FarmBot-Website-Hero-Background.webm
- The user has virtual characters in an app on his phone representing the real plants in his garden. The plant health is represented by its corresponding virtual character on the phone (like Tamagotchi) and user needs to take care of the plants to keep the virtual characters happy and healthy.
- User receives a notification that they have to water their plants notifying them that they need to water their garden. The user will enact actually watering the garden themselves.
- The user can view the moisture levels of their garden on an app. They can then manually water the plants in an augmented reality interface on their phone which will translate into actual watering of the plants in their garden using a connected system.
- Participant Grounding:
- Users had prior gardening experience and we asked them to imagine that they had a small garden in their yard that they planted and tend to.
- Research Questions Addressed by UEs:
- Frequency of Information and level of detail
- Abstractness of information
- Level of automation
- Animism of the system
- Level of User work and involvement
- Level of comfort with digital interactions to conduct physical work in the garden
- UE Participants
- Gardening newcomers or individuals that would like to start outdoor gardening in their yards
Study results
To help us understand how users might react to different levels of system automation, explicitness of information and frequency of contact, we conducted user enactments with 4 participants who all expressed an interest in gardening, and some of whom had limited gardening experience in the past.
By doing the user enactments, we discovered that:
We also identified opportunities to improve the user experience by:
Taking all this into consideration, we have decided that our solution should:
By doing the user enactments, we discovered that:
- Users responded positively to daily updates, and generally felt that weekly updates were not frequent enough. One user remarked, for instance, “I would want to check this information each day the way I check the weather.”
- Users also expected the system to provide detailed information that allowed them to assess what was happening in their garden and how specifically to respond. There was mixed reaction to symbolic displays of information (for example, displaying the garden or its plants as a character with different facial expressions representing different states of health). If this symbolic representation were complemented by a more detailed and explicit overview of data, there was less concern.
- Users had varying levels of comfort with the automation of gardening tasks like watering. Two users expressed excitement at this idea, saying “Sweet!” and “The [purpose of the] system should be to make my life easy.” Another user, however, valued the time spent watering and tending to their garden, but did see value in being able to automate some of the tasks during times when they were away from home and unable to visit their garden.
- We needed to think more carefully about whether and how our sensors would be able to record data from individual plants. Users raised questions about how a single plant could be singled out for measurement, and this prompted us to look closely at how commercially available sensors work, and what their limitations are.
We also identified opportunities to improve the user experience by:
- Providing users with supplemental information about the plants in their garden, beyond the data being recorded by sensors. One user expressed a desire to better understand their plants and how to care for them (i.e., general tips for long-term plant care). In a similar vein, another user wanted to receive information about which plants grow well together.
- Notifying the user about upcoming harvest times, so that they can prepare and avoid wasting their harvest. One user suggested this idea during the user enactment, and this was also brought up by one of our earlier interview subjects.
- Providing suggestions or options for organizing the garden’s space in order to best accommodate the particular combinations of plants that a user may wish to grow. One earlier interviewee brought this up, and one user also mentioned it during their user enactment.
- Simplifying the setup and maintenance requirements of the system. Two users brought up concerns about the complexity of the setup process and the durability of the system components over time.
Taking all this into consideration, we have decided that our solution should:
- Allow users to get both measurements and meaningful contextual information about their garden. The pH level of the soil may not be meaningful to a user unless they understand how different plants react to these levels, for example.
- Give users flexibility and control of the level of automation for watering. Our solution should support users who enjoy watering manually, those who are too busy or do not enjoy watering by hand, and those who need to automatically water their garden on special occasions, such as during travel or in the case of an injury.
- Degrade gracefully. If one component of the system fails or is damaged, it should be replaceable, and should not require extensive work on the system as a whole. For example, each bundle of sensors should be interchangeable and replaceable.
- Be scalable as users’ gardening needs change. Our users showed a diverse range of garden sizes and gardening goals; these variations may also occur over time with a single user. They should be able to scale up (or down) their system as they expand or reduce their garden or change their lifestyle.
Ideation and Selection
For this round of ideation we leveraged the analysis from the UEs and refined certain aspects of our ideas from milestone 02. Specifically, as users were comfortable with tamagotchification (though expressed there would exist a learning curve), some elements of automation and that they really wanted to be an expert, we proposed and sketched a spectrum of different ideas that would pertain to learnings from the UEs. For instance, as we discovered the users were comfortable with personification in design, we sketched multiple types for evaluation.
Though we did rely on UEs to help generate new tweaks to our design, we used a combination of UE findings and prior research efforts from milestone 2 as our selection criteria. A design idea had to be both within the identified boundaries of our user enactments while still mapping to the values uncovered via prior research efforts. For example, one user expressed “where’s the fun in that?” to fully automated systems, eliminating ideas we originally had to have a more hands-off system. Furthermore, as we found that users did not mind daily reports of their garden, this mapped to the values of taking care of something and connecting with the earth. These values could be further expressed through personification within the designs themselves. Ultimately, there are a lot of variables to select from, so we focused on the values most important to users (connecting with the earth, desire to know what’s happening within the garden and a desire for guidance to make the correct decisions) while also looking within the boundaries established through UE. As a result, we narrowed our focus to the design identified under the system proposal.
Though we did rely on UEs to help generate new tweaks to our design, we used a combination of UE findings and prior research efforts from milestone 2 as our selection criteria. A design idea had to be both within the identified boundaries of our user enactments while still mapping to the values uncovered via prior research efforts. For example, one user expressed “where’s the fun in that?” to fully automated systems, eliminating ideas we originally had to have a more hands-off system. Furthermore, as we found that users did not mind daily reports of their garden, this mapped to the values of taking care of something and connecting with the earth. These values could be further expressed through personification within the designs themselves. Ultimately, there are a lot of variables to select from, so we focused on the values most important to users (connecting with the earth, desire to know what’s happening within the garden and a desire for guidance to make the correct decisions) while also looking within the boundaries established through UE. As a result, we narrowed our focus to the design identified under the system proposal.
System Proposal
Our system will allow amateur gardeners to better understand and manage their garden. A set of sensors will rest in the garden and monitor soil moisture, light levels, pH levels, nutrient levels, and temperature. These sensor bundles are placed in separate sections of the garden, and connected to a single box or hub that functions as the communication brain, communicating information about the garden to the user’s home Wi-Fi setup and from there, to the cloud where it can be accessed by any mobile device.
Once collected, the information will be displayed digitally first through an anthropomorphized stylization where the quality of each plant is communicated through corresponding emotional representations and secondarily, through more traditional “business intelligence” quantifiable information. The user will be able to see how well their garden is doing at a glance and then get more detail information about that plant along with recommendations upon selecting their given plant of interest.
We selected this system primarily to allow users to express their values of tending to their earth and through user enactments discovered that users feel even more connected when informed about what is happening within their garden. This makes them feel empowered, more confident and allows them to become more expert-level at gardening. Lastly, users responded well to the “tamagochification” dimension tested through UE’s as it engineered greater empathy between them and their garden; however, participants articulated that a limitation would be a learning curve or inability to intuitively understand what action needs to be taken given the emotional response of a design using animism as a metaphor. Thus, combining the quantified and anthropomorphism into one interfaces will engineer both emotional connection to the garden while also providing useful information to the user.
Lastly, we have preserved the automated watering system as a secondary feature of the proposal. Though one participant indicated “where’s the fun in that?” to the fully automated UE, they did mention that it would be nice to be able to water their plants if on vacation or unable to do so due to work or other commitments.
Such a system could be built immediately given existing technology and its deployment made only cheaper as the cost of instrumentation diminishes in the coming years.
Once collected, the information will be displayed digitally first through an anthropomorphized stylization where the quality of each plant is communicated through corresponding emotional representations and secondarily, through more traditional “business intelligence” quantifiable information. The user will be able to see how well their garden is doing at a glance and then get more detail information about that plant along with recommendations upon selecting their given plant of interest.
We selected this system primarily to allow users to express their values of tending to their earth and through user enactments discovered that users feel even more connected when informed about what is happening within their garden. This makes them feel empowered, more confident and allows them to become more expert-level at gardening. Lastly, users responded well to the “tamagochification” dimension tested through UE’s as it engineered greater empathy between them and their garden; however, participants articulated that a limitation would be a learning curve or inability to intuitively understand what action needs to be taken given the emotional response of a design using animism as a metaphor. Thus, combining the quantified and anthropomorphism into one interfaces will engineer both emotional connection to the garden while also providing useful information to the user.
Lastly, we have preserved the automated watering system as a secondary feature of the proposal. Though one participant indicated “where’s the fun in that?” to the fully automated UE, they did mention that it would be nice to be able to water their plants if on vacation or unable to do so due to work or other commitments.
Such a system could be built immediately given existing technology and its deployment made only cheaper as the cost of instrumentation diminishes in the coming years.
Demo Proposal
For providing the nearest possible experience for our users, we will we creating a working demo of the satellite and hub systems as illustrated above. We will be using a low-cost controller(Lilypad/ATTiny) in the battery operated satellite to read the values of the various sensors at regular intervals and send this data to the hub. The satellites also have a solar cell on top of them which they can use to recharge the battery and power the internal circuit. Alternately, the hub should also be able to poll the satellites in case a real time update is required. Communication between the satellite and hub is planned to take place over a cheap RF transmitter and we are yet to evaluate the feasibility of such a system. The hub (which would be based on a Particle Photon/Raspberry Pi) needs to be connected to the user’s home WiFi set up which can be easily done using the phone app. When the user wants to use a new satellite for a particular plant, she simply needs to add it as a plant on the phone app and the hub will then include it in the list of devices to poll. After the hub receives information from the individual satellites, it will upload this data to the cloud using the WiFi connection. The cloud service will serve as a storage and analysis tool to check on the data received from the plants and will be individually tracked for each user. The user can access this data either from the phone app or a website.
Conclusion
Given the discoveries from UEs, analysis, ideation and selection, it is determined that we will move forward with Plants That Talk as the primary design with the automated watering system serving as a secondary feature. This system allows users to express their most important values with respect to gardening and fits within the boundaries identified through UEs.
With the biggest conceptual questions answered (for now), the details will have to continue to be iterated and tested in order to have a system that meets user values while also being usable. Such details include functionality and navigation patterns of the app, vocabulary and information architecture of the app, feasibility of deployment for a non-tech gardener and narrowing in on which metrics to include in the app.
With the biggest conceptual questions answered (for now), the details will have to continue to be iterated and tested in order to have a system that meets user values while also being usable. Such details include functionality and navigation patterns of the app, vocabulary and information architecture of the app, feasibility of deployment for a non-tech gardener and narrowing in on which metrics to include in the app.