Reframe: D.I.R.T

Moving into Reframe, we revisited our key insights from Immerse. We developed them into the following four points:

  • Proactive garden leaders are the main source of sustainability for a garden.
  • A successful garden does not necessarily  equate to many volunteers.
  • Different gardens have different volunteer bases, operation practices, and contexts which make the 5 best practices not always applicable.
  • Proactive garden leaders have sense of agency in their garden, can start initiatives that are wanted in their community. Autonomy is empowering!

Considering these four points and all of the information we had collected on how the gardens function day-to-day and what successful gardens (like Palm Center) find effective, we spent our next Open Studio reframing our How Can We, which was originally from the project sketch:

How can we create a tool that helps community gardens in food deserts become a sustainable garden?

Our narrowed problem space centered around an exchange of knowledge. We observed that gardens seemed to be alone, despite their connection to each other through Urban Harvest. This connection was simply facilitating a resource exchange, but there was no effective discourse or knowledge exchange to go along with it and allow experienced gardeners to help out those in need of help.

Ultimately, our How Can We became:

How can we encourage gardens to exchange knowledge and resources to spark initiatives in other gardens in the community?

From there, we moved on to figuring out how in Ideate to apply our How Can We in the existing gardening world & Urban Harvest infrastructure.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email