For our final year project, we worked with our industry partner, Samsung, to find a solution for farming at home to increase food self-sustainability.

A lot of market research had to be done, including identifying our target audience and thinking about the process of bringing the product to market. We settled on a refrigerator because of the ideal growing conditions it provided us with: an enclosed temperature-controlled space that has existing connections to electricity and water. It was a long process of designing iterations, reviewing them with our mentor and revising our designs before settling on the final design.

Having to build the actual product also taught me a lot about the translation of a design from paper to a physical reality, and the importance of prototyping as soon as possible. Through this process, it shows us the strengths or weaknesses of different ideas that may not have been considered if we continued designing it on paper or in the computer.

By applying what I learnt in architecture, we considered  the flow within the refrigerator like how we consider the flow within a room. We implemented the U-shape light housing after the initial plan of having a column in the center meant that there would be a lot of wasted space. We used strong magnets on the pot to allow for modularity within the fridge. Other details we paid attention to included designing the plant pots with rounded corners instead of the initial sharp edges, which made it much more safer and sleek.