THE PIXEL GARDEN
2022 ∙ TU/e Industrial Design ∙ Project abroad ∙ Decentralized Autonomous Organizations ∙ UI design ∙ Lisbon
2022 ∙ TU/e Industrial Design ∙ Project abroad ∙ Decentralized Autonomous Organizations ∙ UI design ∙ Lisbon
In this project I explored the possibility of running a community garden as a decentralized autonomous organization. This project was executed within the Human Computer Interaction faculty at the Interactive
Technologies Institute (ITI) in Lisbon, Portugal. This proposed model was created for Jardins Efemeros, an art festival in Viseu, Portugal. The proposed Pixel Garden was created to run on a historic site as an experiment for one year. The available plot measured 8 by 12 meters. Unfortunately, building a physical garden was no longer in the budget and the Pixel Garden remained a proposal.
The first ideation steps were determined mostly by the goal of designing the garden in such a way that does not impose a purpose on its users, after all, the goal of the DAO is for the people to decide what the garden should be. To make sure all possible purposes were kept in mind while designing a list of what those purposes could be was made.
Eventually, to make the garden as modular as possible, the decision was made to make up the garden with square containers called Pixels. The Pixels come in three sizes that can be moved. By covering the Pixels with a wooden cover, they can be used as benches or stages, the or as containers to store equipment.
The community garden is governed by the DAO through a website and a smartphone application. To display what the platform could look like, two Figma UI mock ups were made. The website and application serve different purposes. The website will be the main medium used for the governing of the DAO; creating proposals, and reviewing the DAO’s budget is something that requires people to take a moment and really sit down for. The application is mainly used on location, to collect data about the current state of each Pixel, with which new directions can be decided on. Both the website and the application allow members of the DAO to check news updates, proposals and voting results.
