Priva Microfarm

Abstract

This master’s thesis documents the design process behind Microfarm, a small-scale indoor farm designed specifically for restaurants. Facilitator of this project is Priva, which is a company specialized in horticulture and venturing into indoor farming. Indoor farming involves growing edible plants in closed structures using artificial lighting The first phase of the project aims at understanding Priva and the technical principle behind indoor farming as well as determining which competing products exist and which users are interesting to design for. It is concluded by choosing a specific market segment, which are high-end restaurants. Based on this result, an ideal scenario is created and seven restaurants are interviewed and analyzed using techniques from contextmapping. It is concluded with a design vision that serves as input for ideation. Next, multiple aspects of the ideal scenario are ideated upon, such as the Priva Portal which supplies restaurants with their growing supplies, and working out specific details regarding the physical design and technical aspects. Following ideation, three concepts are proposed, with one being chosen through objective criteria. In the first iteration, the concept now known as Microfarm is further worked out and a business model and prototype are developed and validated. In the second iteration, a customer journey is set up for generating new ideas in enhancing the guest’s indoor farming experience, resulting in Nanofarm, and Microfarm’s design is changed to be smaller and compacter as a result of the first iteration. The last phase of the report describes the final designs of Microfarm and Nanofarm as well as Priva Portal and the business model. Recommendations are given and the project is evaluated. The project is concluded by stating that a small indoor farm is feasible and that high end restaurants are a fitting context for such a product, but there is a considerable chance that such a product will ultimately not work regarding the small impact such a product will have compared to the amount of resources a restaurant will have to invest.