About

This project was started based on a love of providing habitats for our pollinator friends. Bees, butterflies, and beetles have some of the biggest pollinator populations in our ecosystem, yet they are losing their habitats at rapid rates. This will have devastiing effects to out society. One way to combat this habitat destruction is to plant more places for them to live, including your garden.

Project Intentions

The inspiration behind this tool was based on the ways in which I’ve designed and planned gardens in the past. With other tools I’ve used, I found it difficult to be able to customize what goes in my garden. For example, I live in Colorado, which means the plants that might thrive in this environment are different than one might need in Seattle. For this reason, I designed a tool that allowed the user to input the types of plants based on what was best for them.

The overall idea with this tool is to find harmony with both the digital and physical world. This tool allows a user the opportunity to bring something to life virtually through digital creation and directly correlate that to bringing something to life in the outside world. Once a user has planned their garden, they can save an image of the map and bring that with them as they gather plants and begin to put them into their gardens.

Design Process

When I consider my process for designing this tool, it went from visionary to implementable over the series of a couple of brainstorming sessions. The first thing I did was draw out my large vision, which is a highly interactive and highly customizable tool. I wanted the user to be able to control the size of the garden bed, where the garden bed was placed, the size and shape of the tools, and the colors of the tools as well. While this may not be what you see today - stay tuned because I’ve got plans for that in the future. After drawing the big vision, I began to think about the different elements that were essential to making this tool function. I started by drawing a garden bed and two different shapes to test. Once I was able to draw using the shapes only in the garden bed and not outside of it, I worked on “snapping” the shapes to the grid of the garden bed so the bed could remain easy to understand with set alignment. After trying to use modulo in a couple of different ways to measure how close or not the user was from a particular grid line, this feature was set. Having tested and perfected the math needed on one garden bed and a couple of the shapes to be used, it was then easier to create the remaining beds and shapes.

The decision to use geometric shapes to create a more abstracted map was very intentional. Because this map is designed for the user to input the names of the plants they will actually want to be using, I did not want to assume the shape of a certain type of plant. I also designed the look of this tool to have a somewhat retro style that feels relevant to today. The 1970s color scheme is a callback to my grandparents and reminds me of the pride and joy they took in planning their gardens and how that has been passed down to me today.

In the future, I hope to continue to improve this tool and add additional features and functionality. I want to add a slider to each button that allows the user to adjust the color of each shape. I’d also like to see if the user can create a garden bed that is the correct size and placement for their needs. Right now this tool only works on screens of a certain size - the user’s screen can’t be too big or too large. I would like to create a more adaptive and responsive tool using different media queries.