Grow Your Garden

‘Grow Your Garden’ is an interactive installation that aims to teach people
what makes an efficient crop rotation cycle.
Using crop rotation is a more eco-friendly way to grow vegetables as it gives back to the soil and improves its health. This technic can be used in intimate gardens as well as in large-scale agriculture.

This is an overview of the interactive display.

A run-through of how it works and the different types of outcomes will be detailed below.

The screen reads "Start growing your garden by placing a crop on the rotation"

The audience is invited to pick up a globe and place it in the middle and then press the button to test the rotation.

There are eight globes total, each representing a crop.

On one side there is an illustration of the crop, on the other there is the name and the category it belongs to.

The eight crops are Potatoe and tomato (heavy feeders),
beet and onion (light feeder), peas and peanut (nitrogen fixers), oat and buckwheat (cover crops)

If the participant placed less than four crops on the rotation and pressed the button the message "you need four crops in your rotation" will appear.

How it works:

The technology behind it:

The globes are tracked and identified through the ReacTIVision software.

Each globe has a unique trackerplaced underneath it.

Those thrackers are detected by a webcam fixed inside of the display.

The information received through ReacTIVision is then treated by a code I built in Max MSP.

When a tracker is detected, its coordinates will then be tested to see if it is in the correct area or not.

The tracking happens continuously but the message is only sent to the participant when the button is pressed.

The button is an Arduino device that has been coded to send a message to the Max patch.

It was displayed at the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower show in London (about 160,000 visitors over six days)

I was part of the Discovery Area, which is the eduactional area of the show.

As this project was created as part of my MA, the first version was displayed as part of the final show at UAL.

The exhibitions: