1 Leaky “Resilient Smart Gardens” Pilots in the Wild — An action research for improving multidisciplinary capstone projects Birgit Penzenstadler Computer Engineering and Computer Science California State University Long Beach, USA Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland birgit.penzenstadler@csulb.edu Libby Gustin Hospitality Management California State University Long Beach, USA libby.gustin@csulb.edu Caitlin Rubia, Brian Powell Computer Engineering and Computer Science California State University Long Beach, USA caitlinrubia@gmail.com, brian.powell@student.csulb.edu Christian Anca Ascension Gardens, USA christian@theascensiongardens.com Abstract—Millennials and post-millennials often grow up dis- food requires proper gardening techniques, In this study we connected from food preparation despite the indicator of self- focus on teaching students adequate watering practices for preparing meals being the strongest single indicator for long- home gardening. Caetano et al. [4] (p. 566) state, “too little term health. Up to now, our higher education system had struggled with implementing projects that help students overcome water will retard plant growth and reduce quality, while too this disconnection and thereby teach them holistic approaches much will leach fertilizers and reduce aeration”. Adequate spanning multiple disciplines, which could also benefit their watering dictates the quality of the harvest, which is why we future careers. We conducted a multidisciplinary pilot between try to facilitate it by an automation that protects the user from computer science and hospitality management within a senior overwatering (wasting resources) and protects the plants from design project class and service learning capstone class on food sustainability that implemented two versions of a resilient drought. smart garden to compare their yield to hand-watered growing To reduce an individual’s outdoor water usage, researchers boxes. In this paper, we report on the set-up, discuss lessons and practitioners have developed automated watering sys- learned from the pilot, and project future scenarios leveraging tems [4], [9]. However, there have been no scalable, affordable, the sustainability transformation mindset principles that support or easily replicated solutions for people at home who lack transitioning towards teaching sustainable livelihood with the support of ICT. technological skills. There are larger scale approaches for trying to grow food in the desert that need more public engagement though, so exposing students to this topic in a I. I NTRODUCTION drought-prone region is beneficial [17]. Millennials and post millennials often grow up disconnected Therefore, the purpose of this project is to engage millen- from food sourcing and preparation despite the indicator of nials in growing food and thereby using this fresh whole food self-preparing meals being the strongest single indicator for at home as well as to address the issue of food security on long-term health [19] and food sourcing having a significant campus. The long-term goal of the project is to address food impact on fruit and vegetable intake [22], [14], [13], [23], security issues related to lack of access and utilization. In the [32]. Up to now, our higher education system had struggled CSU system, one in five students do not have steady food with implementing projects that help students overcome this access, creating barriers to the ability to learn [5]. Access disconnection and thereby teach them holistic approaches barriers are a result of a lack affordability and/or ability to find spanning multiple disciplines, which could also benefit their markets with fresh produce. Barriers to utilization come from future careers. Growing food can help students connect to lack of knowledge, skills and/or time to source and prepare where food comes from while impacting their health and the whole food [10]. The immediate outcome of this project health of the environment. However being able to grow quality provided fresh nutrient dense whole food to the campus food 2 bank as well as introducing students to the taste and possible 3) Food utilization: appropriate use based on knowledge of use of unfamiliar foods. In the long term, the successful basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and implementation of the a resilient home gardening system sanitation would address these issues on a larger scale by providing an 4) Food stability: must be present “at all times” in terms easy home gardening system to grow your on produce. An 11 of availability, access and utilization. episode cooking intervention, produced by the second author Food security is a complex sustainable development issue, of this paper, can accompany the garden system to help address linked to health through nutrition or malnutrition, but also utilization. The 11 episode cooking show addresses barriers of to sustainable economic development, environment, and trade. knowledge, time and skills in short 15 minutes episodes.1 Approximately 1 in 9 people on earth are food insecure. In The contribution of the paper at hand is that, based on a the United States this equates to 49 million Americans living preliminary prototype reported on in [29], we conducted a in food insecure households [38]. multidisciplinary pilot between computer science and hospi- A study by Barthel and Isandahl (2012) found lessons tality management within a senior design project class and learned from different historical and cultural contexts (the service learning capstone class on food sustainability that Classic Maya civilization and Byzantine Constantinople) sup- implemented two versions of a resilient smart garden to port that urban gardens, agriculture, and water management compare their yield to hand-watered growing boxes. contribute to long-term food security for people living in Our Resilient Smart Garden helps to ensure vegetable plants cities [2]. are not over or under watered. The aim is to find the water bal- ance to grow the perfect vegetable. It also takes the mandatory watering out of the users hands and automates watering based B. Related work on the moisture of the soil. The Smart Garden takes moisture There are a few commercial-off-the-shelf “COTS” systems and temperature readings to decide if the garden needs more that are available in the market to help gardeners grow plants. water. These readings are stored in a database that is accessible The search led to identifying Edyn Smart Garden System [7] online and can be accessed through PC or mobile smart phone. and GreenIQ Smart Garden Hub [9]. Both tools facilitate The data can be used to further research on the best watering the gardening and irrigation but are not targeted towards method that fits for different kinds of plants. educational use. The impact of our work is that the set-up, discuss lessons There are also a few electronic DIY projects are more learned from the pilot, and project future scenarios leveraging accessible with easily programmable single board micro- the sustainability transformation mindset principles can sup- controllers. Daniels [6] offers instructions to make an outdoor port transitioning towards teaching sustainable livelihood with automatic garden watering device using an Arduino UNO that the support of information and communication technology measures the soil moisture levels and is powered by a 12 V (ICT). battery. Aqib [1] presents an advanced automatic watering garden tutorial that will store moisture, temperature, humidity, II. BACKGROUND heat index, pressure, and value status into a database. The controller is powered by a 12 V battery and communicates A more in-depth treatment of related work for this project with a server locally using an Ethernet Shield. Hamza [11] is reported on in detail in [29], and therefore we report only provides information on making a temperature data logger on the most relevant research closest to our work and forming using a hardware clock. The data is stored locally on a se- the baseline for it. cure digital card and does not communicate with a server. Iseman [12] demonstrates an automatic watering garden using A. Food Foundations DIY moisture sensors. Two nails are attached to a wire and Food security encompasses the ability of individuals, house- connected to the micro-controller to detect the soil moisture holds and communities to acquire food that is healthy, sustain- level by putting a low current through the soil via one nail and able, affordable, appropriate and accessible [39]. detecting the resistance via the other. The more water in the The pillars for food security indicate how well the system soil, the less resistance — and vice versa. The temperature, is taking care of its constituents by assuring food, as a public humidity, and moisture data is sent through a serial port, good, is accessible, available and utilizable by all citizens but not stored into a database. The micro controller must be equally. Food insecurity, a household-level economic and connected to a computer to display the data. social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food The Guarduino project [37] in India is most similar in design (United States Department of Agriculture) [36], is a global and to the Resilient Smart Garden. The Guarduino uses a variety national issue. According to the World Health Organization, of analog and digital sensors including light, temperature, Food security is built on four pillars: and homemade moisture sensors that are all connected to 1) Food availability: sufficient quantities of food available an Arduino. Similar to ours, one of the goals for this project on a consistent basis. was to help with production of food by optimizing the amount 2) Food access: having sufficient resources to obtain ap- of water delivered to plants when resources are scarce. propriate foods for a nutritious diet All of these projects have similar approaches to implement- ing an automatically watering garden. Our Resilient Smart 1 http://libbyskitchen.blogspot.com, https://youtu.be/CASHB82Z6B4 Garden shares some characteristics to minimize water usage 3 while maintaining a sustainable environment for the plants. A. Senior design project course The main difference is that we perform the moisture sensing The senior design project course is a capstone course over on a plant-specific basis. two semesters where students are in teams of three to six and develop a product from scratch. In the first semester, we usually follow a more traditional process of requirements C. Previous work specification, design specification, test specification and im- In [29], an extension of the results presented at the LIMITS plementation. In the second semester we move to an agile workshop 2018 [30], the Resilient Smart Garden project is model with several iterations. That way students are exposed to set up for the first time in an indoor lab, which allowed for both common paradigms. In the second semester, students are more controlled variables but also turned it into an artificial allowed to work largely self-directed based on their previous environment with little natural light, thereby artificially tam- experience from the first semester. They report back weekly pering with a few variables. Previous iterations of the garden and we hold reflective meetings to enhance their own analysis had shown that it is feasible to water completely automated, skills and learn from how the project unfolds [18]. but we didn’t have a comparative study that would show whether it yielded more or less than a traditionally hand- watered vegetable garden. B. Service learning course in hospitality management Multidisciplinary research is highly valued by all funding Students enrolled in a general education capstone course agencies in theory, and in practice there are many hurdles called “Exploring a Sustainable Food System” are required that need to be conquered. However, the learning experience to complete 20 hours of service in the community. In this for both sides has been insightful and merits the effort. course, students address food justice in the community. The Multidisciplinary capstone projects are an easy introduction Resilient Smart Gardens was one of the projects the students to conducting multi- and/or interdisciplinary research but, could choose to encourage home gardening as a means to because of the higher number of involved people, require even increase food access in communities. Three student leaders more organizational overhead. We saw that overhead but still were identified and trained to organize the daily watering, thought it was a good opportunity to try out the concept and maintenance and data collection of the project. The student then decide whether this should be made possible for students leaders then trained, scheduled and managed the volunteers on a wider base or only in special cases. while reporting and consulting regularly with the Supervisor Our long-term vision is to integrate this with permaculture of the project. principles, where a garden built of plant guilds can foster human independence from extraneous materials and promises C. Experiment set-up to deliver the highest harvest yield while making keeping the grounds sustained [20]. The comparative experiment was set up to find out whether two planters using two different implementations of the re- silient smart garden idea could achieve as much harvest as the D. Transformation Mindset Tool two hand-watered comparison planters. To be able to harvest after only two months, we planted two specific types of kale Last but not least, we applied the transformation mindset and romaine lettuce. It was run using a special soil developed tool proposed by Samuel Mann in 2017 [16] to further for needing less water. analyze the opportunity for contributing to ICT4S. Mann et In the time line for the semester, the roles, tasks, and al. developed a Transformation Mindset [16] as a means to milestones were the following: guide practitioners in becoming a sustainable practitioner as • Roles: Supervisor for the computer science students was part of their professional framework of practice and defined the “Transformation Mindset as a way of thinking that leads to Birgit Penzenstadler, supervisor for the hospitality man- transformational acts resulting in socioecological restoration”. agement students was Libby Gustin, supporting domain At ICT4S 2018, he brought a DIY kit for the tool that he expert for the gardening with the special soil was Chris- distributed to conference participants and the first author of tian Anca. • Tasks: The computer science students got their implemen- this paper took it back to California and used it with her students. tations ready to deploy in the garden, the garden expert delivered the special soil and seedlings2 , all teams planted and put the systems in place, the hospitality management III. R ESEARCH D ESIGN AND M ETHODS students watered their planters and took readings of all water meters (see instructions in Fig. 1, 2), the computer In the iteration presented in this paper, we added a multidis- science students monitored their systems, and we jointly ciplinary research component and teamed up with a hospitality harvested at the end of the semester. management professor and her students to set up a comparative • Milestones: Planting and deployment on October 10th, experiment to see whether the automated watering planters harvest on December 7th. relying on the Arduino board constructions could keep up with the hand-watered planters by the hospitality management 2 The semester was too short too pull the plants from seed and get all the service learning team. way to harvest. 4 The evaluation compares the amount of harvest across the planters. Furthermore, we qualitatively explore the lessons learned. IV. I MPLEMENTATION AND R ESULTS : L EAKS AND V EGGIES This section describes the steps we took — application of the transformation mindset, implementation and deployment, growing and monitoring, and harvest and results. A. Application of the Transformation Mindset As Mann et al. [16] explain: “The mindset can be considered with a device recognisable to those familiar with software engineering’s Agile Manifesto — a list of values and attributes arranged so that each is defined in part by an opposing value [8]. The agile manifesto structure finishes with ‘that is, while we value the items on the right, we value those on the left more’. These things on the right then are not inherently wrong — we could find people attempting sustainability doing those things, but we argue that the things on the left are better.” The Transformation Mindset can be used to consider different development initiatives. Students analyzed the application of the Transformation Mindset principles before they went about the detailed de- sign and the implementation. We also revisited the principles afterwards during the reflection phase. Fig. 1. Protocol A for the hand-watered planters • Socioecological restoration over economic justification: The resilient smart garden is a low-key, hands-on version of growing food, useful for communities. • Transformative system change over small steps to keep business as usual: The idea of growing their own food instead of choosing what to buy gives students more agency. • Holistic perspectives over narrow focus: The multidisci- plinary project helps broaden the students’ horizon. • Equity and diversity over homogeneity: This is also one of the principles of companion planting in permacul- ture [20]. • Respectful, collaborative responsibility over selfish oth- ering: Taking care of fellow students by donating to the food bank was appreciated. • Action in the face of fear over paralysis or wilful igno- rance: Growing food is empowering. • Values change over behaviour modifications: The project gave students new perspectives. • Empowering engagement over imposed solutions: Stu- dents can choose to grow (at least part of) their own food. • Living positive futures over bleak predictions: Students perceive the opportunity as positive in the face of food deserts in the local drought-prone climate. • Humility and desire to learn over fixed knowledge sets: All setbacks in the project could jointly be overcome. B. Implementation and Deployment Fig. 2. Protocol B for the automatedly watered planters The computer science students had initial prototypes from the end of the first semester of their senior design project. 5 Fig. 3. Arduino monitoring system: schematic diagram on the left, and with encasement ready to be deployed on the right However, taking those prototypes out in the wild required more effort as it turned out they didn’t run stable yet. Furthermore, challenges were to connect them to a wireless module for data transmission as well as getting them connected to solar power. In addition, the databases needed to be set up and connected. All of this took them several weeks at the beginning of the semester after the initial two weeks of getting everything back up and running after the summer break and designing their individual sprint plan for the semester. Figure 3 shows one of the two prototypes before deployment “in the wild”. In the mean time, the supervisors prepared the remaining time line, purchased required hardware, and organized the delivery with the domain expert. The hospitality management students were briefed according to the protocols in Fig. 1 for the hand-watered boxes and Fig. 2 for the automatedly watered boxes. Fig. 4. Set-up of the garden experiment with sensors and automated watering Despite the challenges, we managed to deploy everything on October 10th with a few software updates over the following few days, see Fig. 4 for a close-up of box B2, and Fig. 5 for received several emails from the student union sustainability a closer look at box B1 with all other three boxes lined up representative over the course of the experiment asking us to behind and the sign asking to not tamper with out watering make sure we are not wasting water. This box did end up using system in the front. significantly more water than the other ones. At the end of the experiment, the B1 automatedly watered C. Growing and Monitoring planter used the same amount of water as the hand-watered planter A1 that had used less water (last readings from We started monitoring the systems and found a few glitches. December 5th): It turned out that one of the systems was overwatering due to a not well fitting hose connector, see Fig. 7, so a puddle gathered • Hand-watered box A1: 144.2 gallons next to the planter, see Fig. 6, that was pointed out to us by • Hand-watered box A2: 280.93 gallons • Automatedly watered box B1: 143.33 gallons the service learning student volunteers. We fixed that, but this • Automatedly watered box B2: 1022.25 gallons prototype (planter B2, Fig. 4) continued to slightly overwater despite the team repeatedly reducing the watering time. We While having only two boxes per type does not allow to draw 6 Fig. 8. Harvest on December 7th 2018 Fig. 5. Experiment with warning signs so people don’t take off the hose general conclusions, we see that there can be water wasted using either approach and that one of the automatedly watered boxes and one of the hand-watered boxes using almost the exact same amount of water (0.9 gallons difference) over the course of two months. Box B1, which did well in terms of not overwatering, had a different problem though caused by the exact setting in the garden: There was a large tree overshadowing the box for a large share of the hours the sun was shining on the garden every day. Therefore, the plants did not grow as well. D. Harvest and Results We harvested all grown kale and lettuce on December 7th and took it to one of the kitchens in the Department of Family and Consumer Science to clean and weigh the vegetables. In Fig. 8, box B1 is being harvested by the computer science students. In Fig. 9, the entire team is standing in the hospitality management kitchen behind the cleaned produce. Fig. 6. Puddle due to over-watering at the start Box Vegetable Weight Number A1 Kale 4.3 12 A2 Kale 5.4 9 A1 Lettuce 17.4.18 25 A2 Lettuce 17.7.8 22 B1 Kale 1.13.7 15 B2 Kale 1.8.5 10 B1 Lettuce 12.0.8 25 B2 Lettuce 10.06.3 25 TABLE I A MOUNTS HARVESTED PER VEGETABLE PER PLANTER The exact amounts of the harvest are listed in Table I. Overall, the hand-watered boxes delivered more produce. The number of lettuce heads and kale bunches is in the same range for all boxes, which means no plants died off after we planted the seedlings. There is a clear difference in how well the produce grew though. Both the kale harvest and the lettuce harvest amounted to significantly less weight in the automatedly watered boxes. One of the reasons for the lower amount of B1 could be that this box had less sunlight as Fig. 7. Leaky hose connector with ill-fitting thread mentioned in the previous subsection. However, as box B2 did not have that problem but achieved roughly the same amount 7 Fig. 9. The entire team with the harvest of the four planters of harvest, we know that this is not the only and probably must collaborate and communicate with others who might not not the strongest influencing factor. Box B2 did receive too being working on the same part of the project. much water and as noted by Caetano et al. [4] too much water will leach fertilizers and reduce aeration, which could have Several students would have liked to have more in-person impacted the low yields in this box. meetings across the disciplines, e.g. Another insight I gained After each team member was allowed to take some of the was that not meeting with people in person weakens commu- produce for personal use, we donated the remaining large part nication. of it to the local CSULB food bank3 for students on campus. The hospitality management students reported insights on Bringing the fresh produce to the campus food bank was not growing vegetables: I learned about how much water really only rewarding to the students, it increased their awareness goes into growing vegetables! and I learned a lot about how of the need for healthier food options at food banks as well to water and how much watering and care it takes to have as recipe suggestion and cooking skill support. As a result, successful growth and maintain a garden. all campus garden members are donating fresh produce to the food bank every 2-3 weeks. Hospitality Management students The computer science students reported technical accom- are developing simple recipes to use the food, and consulting plishments, e.g. My major insights on the experiment were with food bank patrons about cooking skills and utilization. the extended capabilities of the Arduino and its ability to be integrated with other technologies like the ESP 8266 WIFI module and the SD card reader module. as well as The V. L ESSONS L EARNED understanding of the data sheets and schematics of all the Around the harvest day, we sent an email to all student components really helped when trying to get the system to participants to ask for their observations and lessons learned: function properly. Having the option to solder and learning What were your major insights from working on the exper- how to do so properly, allowed for easier customization of the iment? What were things you did not expect? What would system in comparison to using a shield for the Arduino. The B1 you do different if you had to do it again from scratch? team tinkered with their system in creative ways to optimize What else would you like us to know about your experience? the accuracy: Adding resistors to the sensor system helped in We collected the answers and analyzed them to improve the the voltage drop to provide a more accurate reading, yet due project organization and management for a future replication. to the complexity of the current being impacted the readings weren’t as consistent. A. Major insights There were also a few technical challenges, e.g. It’s also There were some project management insights, e.g. This extremely difficult to use a board like the Arduino and try to kind of project required contribution from different depart- connect to the school’s wifi because of the networks encryption ments. Much like in the real world were your assigned a role protocols. Lastly, I learned it is very difficult to do weekly in a project, however to continue and complete the project you maintenance, which is probably why a lot of companies don’t periodically release updates on a weekly basis and more often 3 https://www.asicsulb.org/corporate/discover/beach-pantry do so on a bi-weekly or monthly status. 8 B. Unexpected Things the Raspberry Pi board over the Arduino Uno R3 because the Trouble with the readings on the water meters was reported Pi board functions as a computer with a built in module that by several students, e.g. There were quite a few mishaps with would allow the user to log into a network as if the board the water meters. They were very finicky and created a lot was a laptop. Also the Pi is more recommended to use if your of stress for the project. and One thing I did not expect trying to complete a project that is as difficult as ours. Which was having to deal with the equipment not working properly. required multiple components and communicating with other Having a miscommunication in dealing with this was the embedded systems. Furthermore, the garden setting could be biggest set-back for the project by far. I also did not expect improved: The plot would have done best in full sun as well as there to be a certain required level of expertise in horticulture being deployed in the spring through summer. The placement going into the project. of the plants and sprinkler could have been more organized About trying to get ready for deployment, one student and dispersed evenly for minimum amount of watering with reports: Originally when trying to control the water access maximum crop growth. using a solenoid valve, I had multiple attempts soldering together components to control the valve to open and close D. Overall Experience when prompted, which set back the ability to test the watering Student valued the project management experience (It was a schedule. good chance for me to learn more about how to lead a project Furthermore, some of the sensors had problems: We did and how to effectively deal with people and management.), the not expect to have trouble with the data readings the sensors horticulture learning experience (I also learned more about provided. When testing the functionality of the sensors with the how to take care of crops which can help me develop my Arduino, the readings were accurate to information provided own garden eventually.), and reported that they enjoyed being on the datasheets. When wiring the sensors to the WIFI around like-minded people (It was nice to work with people modules for the data to be passed and stored on the Arduino who are devoted in lessening our water usage and improving wirelessly, the readings for the soil moisture and UV sensors water efficiency.). were very inaccurate. One student pointed out the option of doing the experiment The student who tried to solve the over-watering problem at home to save mileage: This kind of project would be better of B2 explained: Some things I didn’t expect to occur was the if the student was allowed to complete the project in one of the constant over-watering. No matter how many times I messed group members home. The reason is because it would allow the around with the parameters on when to water the soil around group to monitor the garden on a daily basis without having to our planter would remain moist. Even after days where the drive to school especially if they live far away. There wouldn’t garden system didn’t water the soil around the planter never be any issues with the wifi regardless of what board the group fully dried. I also didn’t expect to find out that it is impossible uses because the user has complete control of their network. to connect to the school’s wifi. Online there’s all these claims All students gave us positive feedback about the experience, where people have attempted and been able to do it. But, after for example The experience as a whole was very rewarding. attempting to connect using the same method others claimed as well as Overall, it was fun visiting that part of the campus to do online it still proved to not be possible. and communicating with the various people involved with this project. Finally, several students expressed gratitude, for example I really enjoyed being apart of something and seeing C. Do Different in Replication it grow. Working with Claudia and Julio was great. I feel Students would have wanted to up their gardening expertise grateful Libby trusted in us and gave us the opportunity to ahead of time, e.g. I would also research more on garden help run this project. maintenance and how to properly take care of a garden so that we could prevent over-watering. VI. D ISCUSSION OF L IMITATIONS Also, they’d want more interaction, e.g. Cooperate more We seem to have run into a few classic problems of ICT4S with the other groups/departments involved. and I would in student and researcher projects — timescales of production have liked to be in more contact myself with the engineering are out of line with timescales of development; low-cost department about the project. At the same time, several voted sensing is not robust for the environment and application; data for having a smaller overall team: Too many people have accuracy is questionable for low-cost devices due to factory led to a lack of accountability and many misdirections in calibration (or lack thereof); and so on. We are not the first communication. and The number of people involved on the ones to experience these: Peter Lyle and colleagues reported project should stay a little more limited to ensure more on similar ones [15] where they conducted a study using accuracy and reliability for the project. ethnographically oriented methods of participant observation The potential communication improvement was best and semi-structured interviews in a community garden in the summed up by this student: If we could start again, I would city of Brisbane in Australia. They confirm Odom’s [28] have liked to have a meeting with all of the people involved findings, who points out the potential value that could be added with the project, and have had one group chat and one email by improving the visibility of urban agriculture projects. chain including everyone, always. There is a reasonable argument to be made about whether There were suggestions for a different technical platform: technology should even be trying to facilitate these small com- If I had to start from scratch again I would definitely choose munal agricultural efforts, as put forth, for example: “Mate, 9 we don’t need a chip to tell us the soil’s dry”, by Odom [27], for arranging additional mandatory meetings. Consequently, it and others on a more general level on when the implication will take a few strongly motivated and dedicated students to is not to design [3]. We strongly agree with those notions enable an exploration of this cross-departmental development and see that the strongest reason for doing this project was and implementation. to check the feasibility of having a multidisciplinary project across campus with quite a variety of stakeholders involved. VIII. C ONCLUSION In a next step, we would be approaching a local community to observe and learn and see where and how we can support In this paper, we reported on the set-up, discuss lessons by adapting technology to their needs. Granted, that is limited learned from the pilot, and project future scenarios leverag- by the limited success our experiment was able to contribute. ing the sustainability transformation mindset principles that Lastly, while we were enthusiastic about applying Mann’s support transitioning towards teaching sustainable livelihood Transformation Mindset Principles during the inception phase with the support of ICT. We harvested a significant amount of of the project and reflected on them later on, we do see that kale and lettuce, despite the fact that the automatedly watered the implementation falls short in terms of answering the bigger boxes yielded less harvest than the manually watered ones. questions that inspired Mann’s work. This could be mitigated While we consider the conducted action research successful in the future by developing an instrument that helps to tie the in terms of experience, insights and lessons learned for all results of a project back into a debrief of the experience that participants, we also take a critical look at the research. In includes a reflection of the Transformation Mindset Principles. the discussion of “undesigning” [33] and critiquing techno- solutionism [21], [34], we can ask whether we shouldn’t just VII. F UTURE W ORK hand-water vegetables in a personal garden anyways. In our case the potential impact for education and the opportunity for We used Mann et al.’s [16] sustainability transformation a cross-university collaboration was the more important factor mindset as inspiration to draw a couple of scenarios building — and a collaboration between a computer science department on what we did this semester. All of these scenarios have the and a family and consumer science department requires some common goal of developing and designing sustainable food technology to be involved. systems [31]. Broadening to a wider perspective, we should also ask “What if sustainability doesn’t work out?” [35] and work A. Community garden replication more towards resilient community building that can cope with We are aiming for a replication in a Long Beach community limited resources [24]. garden, where we can interact with the general public and build further bridges between the university and parts of the R EFERENCES local community that are not necessary likely to interact much [1] Muhammad Aqib. Advanced Garduino with Data Logging to Database, with academia. While we would have wanted to replicate the 2017. experiment this year in the garden where the first run was [2] Stephan Barthel and Christian Isendahl. Urban gardens, agriculture, and conducted, the CSULB university garden will unfortunately water management: Sources of resilience for long-term food security in cities. Ecological Economics, 86:224–234, 2013. be taken out in its current form for a new building and the [3] Eric PS Baumer and M Silberman. When the implication is not to design future location is unclear at this point. 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