Urban Farm Concept

The basic assumption of our semester design project for an Austrian company in the agricultural sector at the University of Applied Sciences (Wels, Upper Austria) was: "Farming in future will change." As a medium-sized company in agricultural machinery you have to deal with a lot of global trends that could change the market completely in a relativly short time.

We considered the following influencing mega trends on the agricultural sector:

Very early in the process we focused on ideas and concepts in the field of indoor, urban farming solutions. The overall concept was named I-M-Farming, or in words: Intelligent Modular Farming Systems. As part of a whole strategy the concept was split up in different visions according to the year 2020, 2035 and 2050. A first glimpse of our vision you get in the following road map presentation:

As to make it a more realistic scenario the company was based on a real one: Einböck. The new vision of Einböck is that the company is provider of sustainable food-enabling systems. This means that the company is direct enabler for consumers to build their own farm and harvest their own crop according to their needs and wants. According to our timetable we provide three concepts:

More details you can find in the following presentation:

For each concept it is important to know which target group and which context is relevant. By using strategic design tools (See: Strategic Design) you extract the right design style. For example for the concept 2050 the design style observation says that the design styles „Tough Protection“ and „High Precision“ would be appropriate. A detailed version of this procedure can be found here:

The whole project was very valuable for me because we used various methods to ideate (moodboards, storyboards, trend scenarios), to design (sketching, drawing, design style observation, personas) and finally to implement and evaluate (prototyping, roadmap, presentation).

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