PatchWork is a website and companion app around pollinators, community connection, and making the gardening process easier, a solution to help fight pollinator declination.
Most pollinating insects can fly no further than 750 meters, about the length of two football fields, they need safe places to rest and refuel as they make their pollination rounds.
Our inspiration comes from Pollinator Pathway:
A Pollinator Pathway is a series of pollinator friendly areas that are spaced closely enough to create a corridor of habitat. By creating pollinator habitat in your yard and getting neighbors to do the same you can change the local ecosystem.
In looking to the future, it’s clear we need to change how we manage the land to support not only ourselves, but the greater ecosystems. But that’s not always easy, and it’s hard to know where to begin and how best to help.
This project deals with multi-beneficial stakeholders. Our main clients are pollinators, and the goal is to bring more gardeners involved in this gardening process and transform their space to support pollinator habitats. In turn, the platform should show the impact to motivate gardeners to notice the pollinator growth. The product should serve their different needs for them.
I crafted an ideal experience prototype of a new gardener to introduce each phase where the user would come across the issues and how PatchWork can assist and make our client pollinators happy.
I think the best way to solve a complex problem is to paint a picture for PatchWork around what an ideal user experience could be. This "Northstar" journey map gave the team clarity and alignment on a baseline for what we wanted to accomplish and helped the team focus on the key moments.
I encouraged my team to incorporate map design, AR Visualize, and consultant supports in our designs in ways that benefited both users as well as aligned with design goals.
This ideal journey map also serve as the guide for the concept video, and confirm the exact screens we would need to prototype.
With PatchWork, we aim to connect fragmented habitats to stepping stones, improve the experience of gardening and get more gardeners engaged. PatchWork helps people establish pollinator ecologies in home gardens through exploration, connection and inspiration.
Due to loss of habitat and wide-scale use of pesticides, pollinators are declining at alarming rates. These bees, butterflies and hummingbirds play a vital role in maintaining the ecosystems on which our world relies. Pollinator declination can be attributed to the 5 primary reasons shown here:
One of the largest causes of the declination is due to habitat loss cause by human development. Throughout our project, we want to focus on strategies and stakeholders with latent potential to increase pollinator habitat and affect multiple pollinator populations. The area of opportunity is no further than our own backyards: If people can introduce native and diverse plants into the plantable spaces they have control over, more habitat will be provided.
Even the smallest green spaces, like flower boxes and curb strips, can be part of a pollinator pathway.
How do homeowners consider pollinators when managing their plantable spaces?
Before we got started interviewing homeowners, we wanted to make sure we had a good foundation of knowledge on the topic. Our objective for expert interviews was to recruit six experts from different backgrounds with various perspectives on managing plantable space and pollinators i.e. (biologists, landscape designers, environmental planners) to help validate desk research, and shine light to new insights that could then inform our questions and process during the following participant interviews.
Through recreation people can notice/start to care about pollinators more, people take care of what they love and it’s less important if it’s a perfect pollinator plant and more something they’re very excited about so they can care about it more/continue taking care of it.
At the end of the day, if you’re connecting landscape to landscape, you’re helping and that’s the basic premise.
Although insects are overlooked, I have noticed more people start to care about them and realize their importance to ecosystems and agriculture.
I think people raising honey bees is a greenwashing topic for companies.
You should have a critical lenses on a narrow perspective of conservation.
It is important of letting people discover at their own pace.
Our goal was to recruit participants from various locations in Seattle city and have varying experiences in gardening for pollinators. In the end, we interviewed 8 participants who gardened in an effort to help pollinators, and 2 who gardened without an effort/goal to help pollinators.
The goal with this garden tour was to build rapport and gain the overall understanding of their relationship to their gardens. We would ask some questions during the tour like: what strategies they maintain their front and back yards, what activities they do, and what plants specific for pollinators.
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Next, I designed the journey mapping activity to collect rich details for each phase in the gardening process. Here, our goals were to gain perspective on the process of planting, understand area of struggle and even uncover potential design opportunities. It also provided a basic activity to keep participants engaged in the interview.
The activity, lasting around twenty minutes was broken into 3 sections:
The first section of the activity used the following prompt: "Imagine that you have a new space for planting, please think about the phases of building your garden and order them here." The goal here is to learn about the general process of how homeowners plan and order their yards.
The goal of the Step 2 with prompt: "Please look into each step, and think of what you are likely to do. Please organize which tool you might use during each step." The goal is to invite participant look into each step from the beginning, and learn about the homeowner's specific behaviors and tools they use in each of the planning process.
Lastly, we also encouraged them to speak out the most and the least enjoyable phases and tell us why and we had them write on sticky notes.
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During the design of the activity, I modified some details. Initially, I gave descriptive text as instructions and also a lot images with prompts for participants. I found people heavily relied on those prompts and speak out less during the activity test with our classmates. As a result, I removed the text. I decided to just keep 5 images and 5 phases in total as prompts, I aimed to encourage them to think/ recap more during the interview in order to dig out more rich information.
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One of the participants gave a plant to each of us as a gift! By the end of the project, my plant is growing well. I did a good job of taking care of it :)
Since each participant has their thoughts on planting, we concluded their journey mapping activity’s data once we finishing one of the interviews. In this artifact analysis, we highlighted some quotes from the participants of each phase, like what aspects needed improvement or enjoyable, and their wishes or hopes. With the highlighted quotes like this for each participant, it helped us discuss the data efficiently in a team.
After the whole interview process was complete, we externalized our data onto sticky notes of a Miro board to do an Affinity diagramming. We organized data into different themes which led to generation of insights.We also selected some of the emerging themes to dive in: like Self Performance Anxiety / neighbors / goal & wish / learning from others and resources.
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.
• 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.
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?'
• 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.
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?’
• 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 don’t know what the hell I’m doing out here. The butterflies are way smarter than me
• 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.
During the earlier phases, we imagine a tool that could help with the planning and forecasting would be super beneficial. We had some participants mention they would love a planner that could better 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.
01 Environment-Centered Design helps us to keep the pollinators at the forefront.
02 Design a mutually beneficial tool for both gardeners and pollinators.
03 Connect the community to ease information and resource sharing, and help guide beginner gardeners.
04 Record the patches to help show off the whole landscape and point out areas of opportunity.
The insights inform some design directions for us. Based on different themes, we came up so many ideas in response to our design challenge. We also affinity clustered our ideas into respective categories to help us better visualize a solution.
When we ideated the concepts, we had difficulty narrowing down our idea. We want this product to be perfect and incorporate many features into it. I proposed to use storyboards to describe the user journey, and we pushed ourselves only use 9 frames for the key interactions. The storyboards helped us focus on the key moments and are an efficient way to establish context and common ground for all the team members working on a specific problem.
We decided to highlight the moments of forecasting, community connection, and troubleshooting.
I used biomimicry in designing our logo. It was inspired by pollinators and flowers' shapes and symbiosis imagery representing connection and growth. The overall colors encompass PatchWork's brand identity: friendly, hopeful, earthy, energetic and bright.
Based on the Visual Guideline, I also developed the components for desktop and mobile to maintain the product's consistency.
I noticed most of our participants doing work outside of the home. Accessibility was of utmost importance to the project. The color contrast between the font or button and its background needed to be high enough to view easily, and an online contrast checker like webaim was used to ensure it was WCAG AA and ADA compliant.
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.
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.
Using Augmented Reality, gardeners can use pre-designed overlays to preview mature gardens in their space. These layers allow members to toggle between different plants and seasons depending on their planting and habitat goals.
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.
PatchWork connects people and landscape. Members can support each other by attending and hosting workshops or by sharing resources through a neighborhood bulletin board.
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.
This future is avoidable. But we will need to work together to 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.
01 Different user journey (eg: expert gardeners)
I would consider more different user journeys, like how this product can help expert gardeners. How can I keep them on this platform?
02 Connection with local groups (B2B2C)
Second, I would want to look into partnering with organizations (like backyard certifications, homegrown national parks, and local nurseries) and show how these users helped certain species and expanded those pathways. In this case, to inform the design direction in the form of local data.
Plus, through the local groups, I could see how the platform works through different business models since I can reach more customers from these local groups.
