Patchwork is a tool for collective action where individuals view their home garden as part of a connected urban landscape where ecological boundaries stretch beyond property lines.

As part of Patchwork, members build relationships with their communities, learn to grow and maintain biodiverse gardens, and work together to connect fractured urban landscapes, one patch at a time.

Overview

Project Type

Product Design

Timeline

5 Months

Team

Nick Brown
Mikaela Corney
Dongming Liu

What I did

UX/Product Design
User Research
Visual Design
Brand Identity
Digital Prototyping

A Pollinator Crisis

We are in the middle of the 6th mass extinction. This time it’s cause is not a meteor, but human activity and our broken relationship to the land. Loss of habitat, climate change, and pollution are causing an estimated 150 species to go extinct globally, everyday.

An especially sensitive group and essential to our ecosystems and food systems are pollinators. It’s expected that if we dont change the way we manage land, they will be among the first to go.

Discovery Research

Pollinator Perspectives

We recruited six experts from different backgrounds with different perspectives on managing plantable space and pollinators i.e. (biologists, landscape designers, environmental planners) to help validate desk research, and bring light to new insights that could then influence our questions and process during the following participant interviews.

  • Caroline Villanova

    Master Native Plant Steward

  • Gabe Lemay

    Entimologist - University of Florida

Item 1 of 6

Place-Based Interviews

The first part of our interview was a garden tour to build rapport and get a holistic overview for understanding the relationship they had with their gardens. During the tour, we’d ask questions around strategies for maintaining front and backyards, what activities they do, and what plants they’ve planted specifically for pollinators.

Garden Planning Process Journey Mapping Activity

The activity was broken into 3 sections:

  1. Learn about the phases of how homeowners plan and maintain their yards.

  2. Learn about the specific techniques and tools they use during each phase of gardening.

  3. Learn about the feelings associated with different phases. We encouraged participants to speak to their favorite and lease favorite phases.

The second part of our interview was a Journey Mapping activity. This would be used to collect rich details on each phase of the gardening process. Our goals were to gain perspective on the phases of planting, understanding areas of struggle, and uncover potential design opportunities. It also had the benefit of keeping participants engaged in the interview.

Framing The Problem

Keeping up with the Jones’

After the whole interview process was complete, we externalized our data onto sticky notes of a Miro Board to do affinity diagramming. We began organizing data into different themes which led to the generation of insights. Some of our emerging themes were: Performance Anxiety, neighbors, learning from others, resources etc. View full analysis here.

Trial and error must be part of the gardening process to help increase self confidence and learning.

  • Plants are living things and gardeners are empathetic. If they mess up, there’s no going back.

  • This fear of error puts pressure on gardeners to get it right and in turn, this causes them to carefully weigh choices when getting started and committing to plants.

  • Yards are on display for the whole neighborhood to see. Gardening choices and trial and error is seen by the community.

“With any projects like this I get intimidated and I stall at the beginning ... I'm not impulsive at all so if I'm going to do something, I like to do a lot of research before.” - P10

Local expert knowledge helps to set parameters and provide personalized troubleshooting so gardeners are more likely to succeed in their choices.

  • All participants sought out local expertise through either friends, nursery workers, social media connections, folks at farmers market and more for advice on plant selection and care.

  • Local is key here because they have experience dealing with the seasonality and climate of the region.

“My coach ran a seed starting workshop in the spring. It was like, all my questions could be asked and it just gave me a lot more confidence in what I was doing. That’s really what it takes...Before I was just not sure... like ‘Am I doing this right?' - P5

Growing and maintaining a garden builds social capital, encouraging an environment where information, inspiration and tools are more frequently shared between neighbors.

  • Participants often spoke of sharing compost, tools, plants, and more with their neighbors.

  • Every participant also mentioned going for walks to get inspiration from their neighborhood.

“I think it’s a community thing. You talk to people and find people you trust, like [my neighbor] two doors down...he’s always asking us ‘Do you guys need compost?’ -P6

The current narrative on pollinators, hyper focused on Honeybees, doesn’t tell the whole story.

  • Each gardener had a varying amount of knowledge that was inconsistently reflected in their plantable spaces.

  • Many participants associate pollinators with only either bees, butterflies or hummingbirds. Greenwashing contributes to this singular view.

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing out here. The butterflies are way smarter than me. - P2

Opportunity Areas

  • During the earlier phases, we imagine a tool that could help with the planning and forecasting. We had some participants mention they would love a planner that could guide them with when to take certain actions (when to plant/when to water) and also there were wishes in forecasting. Also, we imagined something that could help them envision what their tree could look like in 5 years or how big the blueberry bush could be in a certain spot.

  • There was a general sense of frustration with some of the work that goes into maintenance- for many participants it was their least favorite part of the process, so we’d be interested in exploring how we can help to ease the burden of maintenance or help people to better understand how much maintenance might be needed for certain plants. We could even try and help answer maintenance questions that people had like “When should I be pruning this?”

  • Many participants mentioned going to Facebook, speaking with neighbors, seeking out help from local nurseries, and attending classes to either get information, trade plant seeds and starts, and find tools or other things they needed.

  • We also see these opportunities for connections within the community for resource and information sharing - especially when it comes to troubleshooting issues that arise.

Design Process

Design Goals

  1. Keep the pollinators at the forefront.

  2. Design a mutually beneficial tool for both gardeners and pollinators.

  3. Connect the community to ease information and resource sharing, and help guide beginner gardeners.

  4. ‍Record the patches to help show off the whole landscape and point out areas of opportunity.

Ideation + Down Selection

During our ideation phase we ended up grouping all of our ideas into six buckets: Forecasting and prediction, Pollinator Tracking, Tools, Community, Planning, and Maintenance. You can see a few examples displayed here.

Design Concept Elements

I distilled these main categories further to create the main elements of our design concept. The platform would comprise three main sections: Discover & Connect, Plan & Learn, and a Neighborhood Ecosystem Visualization. The visualization, on the desktop, would serve as the landing/home page.

Habitat Map Concept

This is my early concept of the habitat map. I wanted to visually represent ecosystem nodes or patches and used a watercolor texture to artistically represent the borderlessness of the landscape. This visual language eventually turned into the translucent circles representing patches and opportunity areas you see in the final product.

Storyboarding

Jay the New Gardener

In this process we used storyboarding as a form of rapid prototyping. Running through multiple storyboards helped us concentrate on features that were most impactful. For example the dashboard you see on the first column, second row became something that we felt didn’t make sense in the end. We also wanted Jay, the main character in the story, to follow a path that more closely aligned to that of participants we interviewed.

Jay the Community Leader

The next storyboard followed Jay as he moved into a new house. With a blank slate and little gardening experience, his mom gets him a membership to Patchwork. Besides a few elements, this is a scenario some of our participants went through, wishing there was something to help them along their journey. We also used this opportunity to test some screen wireframes.

Information Architecture

*Click image for a closer look

When it came to designing screens, we first completed some information architecture for both mobile and desktop versions of PatchWork, to act as our source of truth on where all our features would be sorted. Given more time, we would love to do further research and testing, especially here. We could conduct a card sorting activity to ensure our organization makes sense to our users.

Brand

Inspired By Nature

I used biomimicry in designing our logo. It was inspired from the shapes of pollinators and flowers, and symbiosis imagery representing connection and growth. We wanted a simple design that stood for a lot. And looking at the symbol, there are nods to flowers, clover, butterflies, connection all in the shape.

The color palette takes inspiration from nature: from the orange on a butterfly, to the blue of the sky. The primary colors are ‘Dark Green’, Aquamarine’, and ‘Tangerine’. I wanted the colors to be reminiscent of gardening, while also communicating a bright and friendly side of the brand. I considered accessibility and ran the colors through a color checker to ensure the color and size would be legible to people of varying visual abilities.

The typefaces I chose are Arboria and Work Sans. I chose them due to their modern look, their ease to read, and their functionality as they offered a multitude of different weights. It was also important for these type faces to feel organic and work well for both printed material and digital spaces.

Meet PatchWork

PatchWork is a Community

Using PatchWork’s platform, individuals connect to their local communities, learn to grow and maintain biodiverse gardens, and provide essential pollinator habitat, linking fractured urban landscapes.

Landscape Connection

The habitat map shows large scale landscape connection and helps people visualize their place within the broader landscape. Click into an opportunity area to get recommendations on what to plant, or invite your neighbors within to join the PatchWork community.

Community Connection

PatchWork connects people and landscape. Members can support each other by attending and hosting workshops or by sharing resources through a neighborhood bulletin board.

New-Plant Visualizer

Using Augmented Reality, members can use overlays to preview how mature plants will appear in their space in different seasons. These overlays showcase different pre-planned gardens, each focusing on a specific pollinator type. Gardeners can get inspired, save plants to their profile, and work with a Master Gardener to incorporate them within their garden.

Mentorship + Troubleshooting

Get custom planting plans based on your goals and space from PatchWork’s Master Gardeners and receive on-demand regional support if you need help getting started or with troubleshooting along the way.

Working together we can create a community, create a movement, where we all collectively take responsibility for our impact on the land and our influence on the species we share it with.