Housegreen is a smart home mobile application that focuses on helping people in taking care of their house plants by introducing a new approach in maintaining a healthier indoor environment.
Humans have been domesticating plants and taking care of them for food and pleasure since the early stages of homo sapiens history. Today, taking care of house plants still exists as a common habit for general public households.
As Generation Z population gradually enters the workforce, their interest and passion in plants opened up new opportunities in the plant care product and service market. At the same time, new technology in image processing had been advancing and being applied in different industries. This new technology has the potential to provide more expert and convenient solutions for consumers to take a better care of their house plants.
Housegreen takes on this challenge by addressing how might Gen Z achieve a successful plant care so that they can increase indoor air quality, and make an impact on environmental health.
Some of the challenges we encountered while working on the project were:
— Air quality index measurement and what factors have the most impact on it
— Image processing accuracy and reliability
— Seamlessly integrating plant care with Internet of Things (IoT)
— Designing a consistent user experience and user interface for different IoTs
When 90% of our lives are spent indoors, it raises the question of how we can make our indoors healthier and best suited for a living environment. The question becomes more prominent today during a pandemic as more people are working from home for the foreseeable future. After intensive ideations and iterations that had the insights and design principles as a base, we have designed a solution that seamlessly blends into the Gen Z lifestyle.
Research was done in collaboration with Nick Z.
Beyond demographics data, our questionnaire had the following general categories to understand how Gen Z interact and take care of their house plants:
— Tracking plant health
— Plants treatment
— Plants’ value and emotions attached
— Interaction with plants
To get at people’s behaviors and pain points, we incorporated value sensitive design and journey mapping.
Health
Control
Universal usability
Safety
Evolve
Health
Privacy
Sustainability
Sustainability
Control
Control
Reliability
1. Lack of knowledge. While there is an increased interaction with plants, four out of five people use observation to assess their house plant's health, which 90% of the time fails due to plant diseases that are not visible to the naked eye. Plant owners' lack of professional knowledge, tools, and skills to flourish plants is a painpoint for the research audience and a reason to threaten house plants' health. Purchasing the wrong types of house plants is one of the main factors that contributes to the overall lack of knowledge.
2. Lack of emotional connection and authority. According to our research, most people use house plants as decoration rather than companions. Therefore, they lack the emotional connection for successful plant care. Additionally, the lack of authority is seen due to limited resources on active plant care and treatments, which leads to more plants being purchased and abandoned.
3. Current use of technology. We verified the use of technology surrounding house plants and found that two out of five people use their mobile devices to capture a photo of their plants to share on social media or for personal pleasure.
1. Alleviate mental load
2. Support emotional connection
3. Achieve informational design
I learned that not all solutions require a new way of inventing the wheel. Sometimes creating a solution on top of something already working is the most usable and efficient solution. This lesson will help strengthen design thinking and allows me to diverge even more in the design process for future projects.
