How a Museum Garden Connects Community

Better World Museum is creating an edible indoor garden as a form of social action. Garden One is a project dedicated to creating more equity, inclusion and diversity with placemaking. The garden uses emerging technology to enhance human-centered design and helps make growing plants a mobile connected experience.

How does this promote more equity in our community? The answer is built into how we will use the stucture and what we plan to do with creative technology in the design and approach to community outreach. The shelves will hold many trays. Each will be planted with containers holding soil-based grow medium with soil sensors connected to a water-pump system and LED grow lights. The soil sensors will also be connected to a LED array of lights that is solely to communicate to the public when to water and when to pick the trays of plants, as well as to alert one on a mobile device. Nobody needs to ask permission to interact because the design informs the public how and when through colored lights for visual communication and audible prompts for multi-sensory accessibility functions.

The public will be free to plant, water, and harvest the herbs and veggies growing in Garden One, or sit inside and just be. Better World Museum will also reach out into the community to invite diverse groups to visit and plant a tray in the garden. The visiting groups will plant seeds and spend time watering and tending the garden. An aditional art activity or picking salad greens and herbs to share a nutitious snack as a method of community connection, is a way of convening with deeper meaning. Each group will be able to monitor the trays on their smartphones, or laptops at work or home by following an app created for Garden One.

Garden One not only addresses community connection to create a human-centered platform, it’s also a model of smart urban infrastucture for future addressing ecological and sustainbility issues. An edible garden indoors during sub-frozen Minnesota temperatures seems critical in providing green-space, living plant foods, and offering the possibly of survival nutrients in the case of disaster from extrememe climate change or sociatal breakdown. Garden One is not just a Public Art Project, it is a smart-city future solution for a better world today.

More ways Garden One is creating community is with fun creative projects making gardens in different mediums. These creative gardens include painted murals, digital video, and Augmented and Virtual Reality. Public participation is the core of these projects. People have many opportunites in diffrent mediums to express their unique voices and be part of our community, and larger world, growing better together.

*Personal thoughts: This model is great, but one issue I’m sensitive to is this structure isn’t ADA complient. I feel like we actually need to make a new larger orb — Public Art needs to be fully accessible and inclusive for all! Our plan is to work out all our problems on this prototype and then create a better, smarter, fully inclusive ADA accesible model that may be presented in another public space. Ideal public spaces are in a museum, library, school or university, hospital, airport, civic plaza, or town center.

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