Becoming Growers

The focus of this project is to propose how novices could be empowered to grow food and to simplify the process of learning how to do so. Today most of us lack both knowledge and experience if we’d like to grow food, the typical contemporary lifestyle with busy schedules and travels don’t match well with vegetable gardening, there is a lack of both time and community.

This project is situated in northern Sweden, which is 2/3rds of the country with only a 10th of its population. The climate of the north demands its own type of gardening knowledge. What i saw was that, most knowledge that does exist is locked up within individuals. I asked myself how this knowledges might be unlocked and shared with others to learn from.

I wanted to create a bottom-up, non-profit solution that could become real. Instead of focusing on innovation of something new, this project focuses on integration of the existing. The Solution is built upon pre existing financial and educational support structures but utilises and applies its strengths in new digital contexts.

My final result called Mycel is built upon a pre existing old study structure called study-circles. Mycel utilises its strengths as format of learning together with others, combines it with a match function and applies it in a modern digital context.By building upon this preexisting study-structure Mycel also makes use of a well established financial model to become a real product for people to use.

The final proposal is a service for finding others to learn with/from or for exchanging mutual favours, focused on vegetable gardening. It increases connections between local people and helps growers help each other.
Its 3 functions are:

Learn together: Simplify finding likeminded people to learn together with & offer an established and free structure on learning how to grow food.

Mutual favours made easy: Match people with specific practical needs to enable more people to grow food, find a Vacation Watering Companion for example.

Unlock & share local human knowledge: Format for adding, rating and describing how specific seeds/plants/methods have worked out in local conditions. Create a reliable database of information about how local ecological growing might be optimised and developed.