As part of Team FarmBridge, I’m handling the web development and design as we gear up for the Microsoft Design Expo this mid-July in Redmond, Wa. Here’s a snapshot of FarmBridge.org. I’d like to give a shout-out to CSSEdit and Niall Doherty’s Coda Slider for being awesome. It’s the first time, I’ve really hand-coded a web design as thoroughly as I have (now I’ve done SocialDrinkster, StreetSnaps, etc but this was on a different level) on a front-end level.

The written content will be updated as we draw closer to showtime but if anyone’s curious to poke around, feel free. Just realize it’s under construction, sssssh.  Also, as a social media ninja, I’ve started up FarmBridge on Twitter and it now has its own Facebook Fan Page. Join us there too!

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food

We won the Design Expo 2010 challenge for NYU! Here’s my long-due documentation about my 12-week coursework for ITP’s Design Expo course, taught by Prof. Nancy Herchinger.

What is Design Expo?

“Microsoft is providing a forum around the theme “Service meets Social” to showcase exceptional design process and ideas.  As part of a semester long course, students are asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 2-4 students to design a user experience prototype .Students will research a design problem which is related to the theme this year, define a scenario, ideate design solutions, select one idea to prototype, and study the impact on real users.”

Team’s Response to “Service meets Social”

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food. As a team, we came to the realization that as New Yorkers, we are passionate about food and our local neighborhoods.  However, New York City is a city of extreme income disparity  where  entire communities do not have access to the kind of fresh, healthy that we care so much about. Our solution became FarmBridge.  We want to create an online platform that makes it easier for neighbors to form groups and gain access to locally farmed food.

Local Food Movement: What’s Our Cause?

For a user audience, we decided to focus on community supported agriculture groups (CSAs). These are local neighborhood communities that band together to buy directly from area farmers. So, why CSAs? Why not farmers’ markets, mail-order, or whatnot? See below:

1) Grassroots approach to the problems that the local food movement aims to address.

2)Our research points to at tremendous demand from within community.

3) Model most able to get good food to people who live beyond just the wealthier neighborhoods in the city.

User Needs + User Research:

These communities are facing demand that is quickly outpacing their logistical/administrative capabilities. Each community handles their own administrative/logistical setup in different ways (pen/paper, Excel, Google Docs, email, Ning, etc) and are dependent on volunteer core managers who deal with membership setup, farmers, budgeting, etc. They all go through the same iterative processes but resources are rarely shared (that is starting to change but is happening slowly on an ad-hoc basis).  These methods may be fine for a small-scale setup but what happens when demand skyrockets? How do you let success not lead to your community’s failure? Ex: You had 50 people in your membership but the following year, you have 200, 300 people showing up at your neighborhood pickup spot?  How do you make sure that your community group can handle volunteer changes, vendor changes, etc. without disrupting your membership? How do you offer the same close-knit, social community feel that CSAs inspire within an online space but w/o that sterile, anonymous feel?

We attended a New York City conference for local food organizers and communities, spoke to over a dozen organizers, volunteer coordinators, and members. After listening to this specific community, we figured out our audience and how we could provide a service to them.

User Audience:

We are going to provide CSA managers with the tools they need to run these communities. Furthermore, for members, we want to emulate the same neighborhood feel that these communities inspire in real life by offering a social space for them online.

Design Prototypes

With our presentation – we delivered a clean vision of what we wanted. We wanted to offer easy, friendly way for these communities to self-organize and manage themselves. We also wanted a warm, inviting design for which members felt compelled to share content and communicate each other online in valuable ways. We hope that with our designed platform we can help this movement grow. For further documentation, please visit teammate, Julio Terra and his excellent documentation.

Now what?

From each school, a representative team from each school (ahem, us!) will be featured in a presentation at the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Summit July 12-13, 2010 in Redmond, Washington. “The Design Expo creates a forum for encouraging “out of the box” thinking, by exploring students’ visions for the future of computing as well as honing their presentation skills.”

So, Microsoft’s 2010 Design Expo Challenge is “Service Meets Social” and ITP is ready to tackle that amorphous concept now that Prof. Nancy Herchinger has finalized our teams. My teammates, Julio Terra, Noah Waxman, Tianwei Liu, and I tussled with the ideas of household savings management for families versus making environmentally food accessible to urban dwellers. How can technology aid either need? What serves as a greater impact? Food for thought (pun intended).

After much discussion, my teammates and I  are looking at the issue of making local, environmentally friendly food available to urban dwellers. Essentially, we’d like to strengthen the community of local farmers to local customers for those of us who would like to see better bulk buying power, accessibility, etc. then what is currently accessible (local bodega, super market, farmer’s market, Whole Foods, FreshDirect.com, etc). New York City has a very strong network of CSAs and Farmer’s Market and we hope that we can make local agriculture even stronger by expanding the options for where local farmers can market their wares (directly to consumers) with the convenience of online technology. As Noah said: “Let’s empower local farmers to retail their own produce while giving urban-dwellers a greater sense of connection to the food they eat.”

We’ll be doing investigations and interviews with farmers, current networks between consumers/local farmers, profiling produce selection at various locations, among others for the next weeks ahead. Let’s just say: Google Wave will be our very close friends while we’re coordinating this.