About Permaculture Design Tools
We observe and propose a way to bind sustainable agriculture practices like permaculture and computers.
We don’t want to introduce computers or robots on the field but rather to support humans on the field by providing open knowledge and visibility.
This project has been pitched to the Shuttleworth Foundation with the support of the London Open Data Institute. Sadly, it did not go through.
Plants and Seeds Database
Design optimal datasets shared in an open format. It is an open knowledge foundation of the following points.
Contextual Crop Calendar
Crop calendars are manually created and updated by some farmers unions and independent initiatives.
There is a need to deconstruct existing material to gather varying requirements, to determine contextual datapoints such as geographical location and weather conditions.
This will provide a calendar framework to reproduce, to cover and to distribute over a broader geographical spectrum.
Orchard and Vegetable Beds Visualiser
Many professionals draw their design plans by hand. The visualiser is a complementary tool to plan the workweeks and make it readable by non-experts.
- User research to understand how farms design their plans and dispatch the work;
- Develop a prototype;
- Iterate over weekly feedbacks and interviews (readability, helpfulness…);
- Scheduled email digests to farm staff.
Vegetable Beds Designer
This is an extension of the beds visualiser to enable experts and non-experts to design their own beds (at farm, allotment and home scales).
We could possinly prototype a democratic web or Excel interface with the following features: calendar export, timeline simulation, crop pairing.