My team and I designed a mobile application that empowers volunteers at the University of Washington Farm to cultivate a sense of purpose and community by tracking farm progress through an educational and social lens.
The UW Farm is a 1.5 acre student powered urban farm located on the University of Washington Campus. Being an urban farm, the UW Farm is a unique space on campus, being a sustainable landscape and educational facility.
Students and volunteers
The farm relies heavily on the contributions of students and volunteers to maintain its operations and handle daily farm responsibilities. The farm is mostly powered by student volunteers and each quarter they receive an influx of students volunteers or service learning students. These service learners are often only at the farm for the quarter to meet a class requirement.
These service learning volunteers often lack farming experience, require continuous instruction, and as a result cause a strain on the farm's production needs.
What is rooted?
Rooted is an educational and social application for volunteers at the University of Washington farm to build confidence, meaning, and a sense of connectedness in their role at the farm
Rooted helps volunteers stay engaged and provides them with an opportunity to develop a strong personal connection to the farm, leading to sustained engagement and a thriving farm community. sense of purpose and community by tracking farm progress through an educational and social lens.
Features
Prepare for a shift
Volunteers can view a summary of an upcoming shift on a given day including the shift leads, farm location, tasks, and various educational resources. Volunteers can also learn about the importance of certain tasks and which produce these tasks are associated with. They can also watch demonstration videos of specific farming tasks before arriving to the farm.
Follow Produce Life Cycle
Volunteers can favorite and select a specific crop to view and track its entire life cycle, as well as view memories from throughout the various stages. This allows volunteers to learn what is happening at individual stages of growth.
Share Memories
After capturing images of special moments on the farm, volunteers can upload these images to the corresponding growth cycle stage after volunteering. Volunteers can favorite and browse a collection of memories from other shifts and different stages of the growth cycle.
Manage your shifts
The Community Engagement and Leadership Center (CELE) at the University of Washington offers community-engaged courses that require students to complete at least 20 hours of volunteer work throughout the quarter. Rooted helps volunteers log their hours, sign up for shifts, and keep track of their progress towards the 20 hour requirement.
The Challenge
Each quarter the UW Farm receives an influx of student volunteers coming to the farm to meet a class requirement. These volunteers often feel disconnected from the farm's purpose as a community and lack the necessary experience to help the farm meet its production needs, often causing strain on the farm production ecosystem.
We spoke to 14 different farmer’s market vendors in the Seattle area to learn about their farming practices, the challenges, and the opportunities that small farmers face regarding distribution of their produce
We also spoke to SMEs to learn more about regenerative agriculture in the Seattle area and learned that some of the issues surrounding regenerative agricultural practices were too large of a scope to address. One of the SMEs we interviewed is the manager of the UW Farm and we learned about the points of frustration and challenges the farm faces.
This SME interview eventually led to a pivot in our research and scope for the project. We realized our scope was still too large and we wanted to narrow in to researching about the local farming community at UW.
Research
We used a variety of research methods to understand the journey for a student volunteer at the UW farm and what the experience of recruiting, training, managing students is like for farm staff.
Research Methods
We spoke to 14 different farmer’s market vendors in the Seattle area to learn about their farming practices, the challenges, and the opportunities that small farmers face regarding distribution of their produce
We also spoke to SMEs to learn more about regenerative agriculture in the Seattle area and learned that some of the issues surrounding regenerative agricultural practices were too large of a scope to address. One of the SMEs we interviewed is the manager of the UW Farm and we learned about the points of frustration and challenges the farm faces.
This SME interview eventually led to a pivot in our research and scope for the project. We realized our scope was still too large and we wanted to narrow in to researching about the local farming community at UW.
Research Insights
These insights informed our direction to a more refined design challenge surrounding the UW Farm
Design
During our first brainstorming sessions, I sketched 20 ideas and came together with my team to explore the 80+ ideas we produced as a collective. We downselected from 80+ ideas to 3 high level concepts using our initial design principles:
Initial Design Principles:
Meaningful and provides a sense of purpose
Easy to implement with existing framework
Nurtures intrinsic motivation
Promotes community building
Using these design principles, my team and I synthesized our design ideas, had some discussions on balancing blue sky ideas and working with constraints to down select to 3 high level design concepts.
We refined our design challenge to center in on the experience of service learners on the farm. Service learners volunteer at the UW farm to complete a required amount of volunteer hours for the Urban Farm course.
We also wanted to define the form for our ideas - what would our design ideas look like in a physical form? And what might go into fostering meaningful experiences and intrinsic motivation for service learners
These conversations led us to our evolved design principles
We combined our top ideas and landed on the concept of an interactive crop progress timeline. This would allow volunteers to document their progress throughout the quarter/school year and bridge volunteers across all stages of the produce lifecycles.
Using our design principles we wanted to create an app that
Incorporates an interactive lifecycle that visualizes crop growth and progress
Includes memorabilia through personal “ diary entries”
And we wanted the app to
Support shift sign up and volunteer hour logging
Leverage moments before and after shifts
Using storytelling as a tool to visualize the user journey
We mapped the user journey of farm staff and volunteers from the touchpoints of task/shift scheduling, task delegation, teaching moments before a new task, working on the field, and post shift.
We used storytelling as a tool to consider when our app makes an impact, to define the hero moment and other key moments, and to refine the user flow for the app itself.
Low Fidelity Prototyping
We defined the key features for the app and visualized the details of what the app calendar, task sign up, growth cycle, and memories interfaces could look like.
These were some of the paper sketches I made for specific features of the app that included the homepage, task list page, memories, and crop growth cycle/timeline update page.
Creating low fidelity paper sketches allowed me to conceptualize my ideas, be creative, and design as I received feedback. This also allowed for a free form of ideas for the app in its beginning stages. As the team and I discussed and received critiques from instructors, we transitioned to using Figma as the primary tool. Figma allowed me to refine my ideas and concept into a more comprehensive mobile app.
Crop Growth Cycle
After sketching my ideas on paper I created low-mid fidelity versions of the crop growth cycle and memories section using Figma. These prototypes were a skeleton for our ultimate designs that incorporated colorful, cut-out, Eric Carle inspired graphics and style.
The design process included establishing four design principles to guide our development of design concepts and key app features. With a plethora of design ideas, feedback from peers, reflection, and discussions we also developed down-selection criteria to help streamline the app to include key features: produce life cycle visualization, a “shift center” for volunteers to input hours, and a calendar for volunteer shift sign up.
Manage Shifts - Log Volunteer Hours
Farm volunteers log their hours using a paper sign up sheet and sometimes an online form provided by the farm. Rooted helps volunteers log their hours, sign up for shifts, and keep track of their progress towards the 20 hour requirement for their community engaged courses.
The app includes an option for volunteers to log their hours via the app. This allows for volunteers to track their hours and helps volunteers visualize the progress they are making toward their course requirement
Calendar and Shift Sign-Up
Volunteers can view the farm calendar to view upcoming farm events and view available morning/afternoon shifts and sign up for shifts.
Shifts at the farm happen throughout the week, both in the morning and afternoon. The Calendar feature is intended for volunteers to sign up for shifts. Our first iteration only offered a weekly view for both morning and afternoon shifts. This iteration includes tabs to switch between logging hours for your shift and the calendar view. Within the calendar, the dots indicate days on which you have signed up for a shift or when there is a farm event happening.
Impact
As a mobile app, Rooted can supplement the farming experience for new volunteers.
Rooted can address service learners' unmet educational needs through the Today’s Task feature that explains the importance of certain farming tasks for specific produce. This could help volunteers become more engaged in their role at the farm and therefore lead to sustained long term involvement with the UW Farm.
Rooted was designed to help amplify the farm’s potential to inspire conversation and bridge volunteers across the various production life cycles at the farm.
Rooted was initially created for volunteers, but it serves as a valuable tool for UW Farm staff, assisting in easing some of the daily challenges associated with farm management. By providing an extra resource for volunteers, Rooted can contribute to the development of empowered, knowledgeable, and resourceful individuals capable of guiding newer volunteers.
Next Steps
What's Next for Rooted?
Reflection
Throughout this project, I became more comfortable with the uncertainties of the design process; our journey began with sustainable agriculture methods, shifted to agricultural product distribution, and finally led us to exploring the volunteer experience at the UW Farm.
Our various pivots were opportunities for us to dive deeper into the farming ecosystems in Seattle. I would have never guessed that there was such a rich and thriving farming community in the middle of a bustling city. I also learned about user interface design, how to create a visual system, and how to create a cohesive visual system for the Rooted app.
I am grateful that I was able to receive experience designing from the research phase to user interviews to low fi prototyping and to our high fidelity prototype. This will help me tremendously as a designer so that I am able to understand the full life cycle of the products I design. This is one of the most comprehensive design projects I’ve worked on and most hands-on projects I have been a part of. I was truly able to get my hands a little dirty by volunteering at the farm and I have gained an even greater appreciation of food and the UW Farm community.
