- Hi, I'm Yuichiro Takeuchi from Sony Tokyo,
and the title of my talk is Printable Hydroponic Gardens:
Initial Explorations and Considerations.
Well, I guess you're all excited for the reception now,
so please bear with me for one last talk.
So first I'd like to briefly introduce myself.
I lead a small team at Sony's Computer Science Lab in Tokyo,
and we're pursuing a concept that we call habitable bits.
We're interested in the built environment.
We want to add new layers of plasticity and interactivity
to the built environment, and ultimately realize things
like buildings that can be freely customized
like Facebook profiles, or cities that can be customized,
collectively edited like Wikipedia.
And as part of our agenda,
we've been looking into digital fabrication
and how it can us achieve this goal.
So we started the project with the goal
of establishing a 3D printing technology for gardens.
So that's what I'll be talking about today.
So people will design their own gardens of whatever shape
on their computing devices, and then the garden printer
fabricates the gardens, prints the landscape
and embeds seeds.
This session is about food,
but food wasn't really exactly what we had in our minds
when we started the project.
We more inspired by the phenomenon of DIY
or do it yourself urbanism.
Some people call it tactical urbanism.
So it's a form of urban renovation, urban design,
where citizens take the matter into their own hands
to solve problems in their neighborhoods by themselves
instead of waiting for the city to act on their behalf.
San Francisco is the global capital
of this type of movement, and about 10 years ago,
a group of designers slash activists,
they illegally converted a roadside parking lot
into a park, and they called it Parklet,
and that kind of set the whole movement into motion.
So it started out as an illegal activity,
but now the city of San Francisco
recognizes the importance of this potential
of this kind of citizen led urban renewal,
and these activities are now officially sanctioned
through a program called Pavement to Parks.
And over the years the movement has grown
to other cities in the US and also abroad,
In the American Exhibition
for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale,
they showed a compilation of various examples
of DIY urbanism projects, including parklets
or guerrilla gardening and chair bombing, et cetera
that took place across the United States.
And the movement got a further boost last year
when a group of architects from the UK
that work with local communities
to engage in this kind of bottom up
urban renovation, regeneration projects.
They won the prestigious Turner Prize for their work.
A lot of DIY urbanism projects
deal with creating gardens and farms,
adding greenery to cities,
and we think that by using digital fabrication technology,
we can accelerate this kind of DIY garden making.
So by reducing the associated technical hurdles
and also the amount of commitment that is necessary
to participate in such projects.
So we want to make DIY urbanism more accessible,
kind of like how Twitter has made social activism
more accessible to the public.
And we think increased accessibility is imperative
if we want to bring DIY urbanism to cities like Tokyo,
where I came from, which has a range of factors
that have so far prevented the phenomenon
from really taking off in the city.
So that is the original motivation behind the project.
And I want to clarify one thing.
In the title of our paper,
there's a term called hydroponics,
and some of you might have been wondering what that means.
What the hell is hydroponics?
Hydroponics refers to a technique to grow plants
without using soil.
So instead of using soil, in hydroponics,
you grow plants using a industrial substrate
like sponge or felt or a urethane foam.
So in our work, we're printing hydroponic gardens
so we don't use soil.
And there's a drawback to hydroponics.
Unlike soil, these industrial substrates are like sponge.
They don't contain any nutrients by themselves,
so you have to add them externally.
Typically when you give water to a hydroponic garden,
you first mix it with a liquid nutrient solution,
so that increases maintenance cost,
but the technique itself is highly scalable and versatile
and it's widely used in gardening and farming, agriculture,
and it's especially useful when you want to create gardens
with non-traditional form factors
like these vertical gardens that grow on building walls.
And another thing I want to clarify about the title
is that it says, "Initial Explorations and Considerations."
Initial, so if you're expecting
some groundbreaking research achievements,
you're not gonna see anything.
You're not in luck.
You'll have to wait until next year.
So what we've done so far
is we've been trying to complete the initial step.
We've been trying to find a suitable material
that is easily 3D printable,
and also functions as an effective hydroponic substrate.
So it has to fulfill our list of criteria,
including the ability to absorb water, for example.
So from here, we'd like to talk about some of the results
of our initial investigations.
At first, we were interested in a single material solution,
so the entire garden will be printed
using a single material.
That seemed like the most elegant solution to us
that'll make life easier for us down the road.
But, to be honest, we didn't really get far
with the approach.
The closest we got was
with this yarn-based printing technique
that is based on work by Hudson,
and shown in CHI 2014,
so two years ago at this same conference.
So, printable, first fabricate a 3D landscape out of yarn,
and then plant seeds from above.
So for the implementation, we took an open source
RepRap 3D printer, that's about this big,
and we hacked it.
We installed two custom heads.
One is a yarn printing head
that is a straightforward replication of Hudson's technique
from 2014.
And the other is a seed planting head
that actually just drops seeds from above
with the hope that the rough texture of the yarn landscape
will catch the seeds.
And by using Hudson's technique,
we can fabricate a felt-like landscape using yarn,
layer by layer, by punching the yarn
into a felt-like structure.
And the seed planting head,
it just drops specified types of plant seeds
in predetermined locations.
And in the end, you get what looks like a chunk of yarn,
but if you give water and light,
eventually the plants will sprout and grow.
And one thing we need to clarify here
is that at this stage, we were just trying to figure out
what kind of material works and what doesn't,
and we didn't bother to design
a fully automatic, polished pipeline so to speak,
meaning that between the yarn printing phase
and the seed planting phase,
we had to manually switch heads.
So the process is not fully automatic.
And ideally we would have just a single printing head
that implements both functions simultaneously.
We didn't bother to pursue
that level of polish at this stage.
And in the end, we had some good fun
with the yarn-based technique.
Plant growth was very good, which was actually expected
because felt is a material that's already commonly used
in hydroponic substrate,
so it's used in many vertical gardens, for example.
But there were several flaws with the technique
that we couldn't really solve,
and the most important was the lack of scalability.
So yarn-based printing is really, really slow,
and we couldn't find a way to speed up the process
to acceptable levels.
And typically hydroponic gardens,
they're of modular construction,
for reasons such as ease of installation,
also to make it easier for, for example,
to contain diseases and to deal with dead plants.
So even if you target building sized installations,
we don't necessarily need a building size printer,
but we need a certain level of scalability,
and the yarn-based technique wasn't able to provide that.
So we look for a less elegant, multi-material solution
that involves a combination of materials,
and after a string of failures,
we set out on a tech inquiry.
Print the landscape as an empty shell
using a material called POROLAY,
which is a mixture of plastic and water soluble polymer.
So if you print an object using this material
and then expose it to water,
the water soluble parts dissolve
and you get a porous structure
with a modest level of water absorption capability.
So we print the empty shell using the POROLAY,
and fill it with another material.
We used clay pellets here, but this is interchangeable,
so allowing it granular materials
with high water absorption capabilities should do the trick.
When we plant seeds, we don't just drop them from above
like we did with the yarn-based printer,
but instead we extrude a mixture
of seeds and superabsorbent polymer,
that's the material that you see in diapers,
the material that can absorb hundreds of times their volume.
A detailed explanation can be found in the paper,
but the way it works is that,
in order for the seeds to germinate,
it needs water and moisture,
and that is provided by the superabsorbent polymer.
Eventually, the polymer gets washed away from the surface,
but by that time, the roots will have reached
the internal fillings, which can then provide them
with the water and structural support.
And for the implementation,
we again hacked a open source RepRap printer,
and the outer shell was printed
using just a standard FDM pencil,
there's no customizations there,
and the only custom component is the seed planting head
that extrudes a mixture of the seeds and the polymer.
And again, we don't really have a polished pipeline.
We don't really bother to build that
and so there's manual labor involved in the process,
but we achieved moderately good growth
with reliable and scalable printing.
So we're now moving on to larger scale printing.
We're hacking a printer that's about two meters tall
and we designed a custom head that consolidates
all functionalities into a single head,
unlike the small scale experiments.
So it offers a mostly automatic pipeline.
So this is my last slide.
So it says it's not really a gardening community
or a urbanism community or a architecture community,
at least primarily.
There might be a limited interest
in those aspects of our work,
but I know the community has a strong interest
in digital fabrication, and if you look at this work
purely as a digital fabrication research,
I think it's still pretty interesting.
Lately in digitial fabrication,
there's a lot of interest in devising ways
to print functional systems as opposed to static objects,
like electronic devices or mechanical apparatuses
or human organs, those are biological systems,
and in this work, we were trying to print
ecological systems, and it seems that
that's an underexplored research direction
compared to the fabrication of electronic or mechanical
or biological systems.
And so I just wanted to point out that is the direction
that we'll be taking much further.
For example, we already have a sizeable knowledge
about what kind of environments are conducive
to the survival of specific type of insects
or animals and birds.
So maybe we can print tailored environments
that will provide habitats for targeted creatures.
So incorporate not just flora,
but also fauna in the gardens.
So who knows?
And someday you might be printing forests
or even nature itself.
And so I invite you to join us in pursuing this direction,
and thank you very much,
and I'll be happy to take any questions.
- [Red Haired Woman] Thank you.
(audience applause)
Any questions?
While, okay, yeah, go for it.
- [Voiceover] Quick question.
How do you give the nutrition to the seeds in the field?
Because you were talking about, in your first slides,
you were talking about that, one of the problem is that
you have to manually add nutrition to the--
- Yeah, exactly, yeah.
The seeds themselves contain the nutrients
that are necessary for the germination.
So before sprouting, you don't really need to add nutrients,
but after the seeds sprout, and eventually,
you'll start to need to add
liquid nutrient solutions to the water,
or otherwise they won't get enough nutrients to grow.
You can still grow plants to a certain level
with only water, but it won't really
get much bigger than that.
- [Voiceover] But after that you have to add more.
- Yeah, exactly, you have to mix the water that you give
with the liquid nutrient solution.
So that's pretty much the same
with every hydroponic garden out there,
and yeah, that does increase the cost somewhat.
- [Voiceover] Lene Nielsen from IT University of Copenhagen.
I have a garden, I also knit.
Why 3D printing?
I mean, there are knitting machines that are quite big.
You can knit whatever, and you can also form knitting
in whatever form you want,
so you can program the knitting machines.
And when I buy seeds, I buy them on strings of paper,
so I don't buy seeds that you actually
have to put in the ground, but they are sewn,
they are glued to strings of paper many meters long.
So, have you considered other, maybe more simple methods
of printing gardens?
- Yeah, well.
With this project, we went for the
utmost freedom of form,
because one reason is that we wanted to,
when we considered densities like Tokyo,
we have to be really creative about where we plant gardens
or where we put greenery.
So it's not really practical to create,
if you ever come to Tokyo, you'll understand that,
even if you put something on the ground,
people are gonna get pissed off, right?
Because every piece of land is so precious,
even if it's a beautifully crafted garden.
So you have to put greenery in really exotic places
with exotic form factors,
and that's why we tried to go with 3D printing.
We thought that is technology
that will give us the most freedom of form.
But yeah, we admit that there are more easier ways
to create, if the sole objective is to add greenery,
there might be more simpler solutions, yes.
- [Red Haired Woman] I have a question for you.
So I know that you've envisioned your 3D printed gardens
as something that could impact,
for example, a city like Tokyo,
where you say gardening skills are limited
and people don't have time.
But in the very ambitious vision you have
in the bigger scheme of things,
how do you think...
Very many keen gardeners,
what they love about gardening is the labor
that they put into it, the hard work
to get the garden to be a garden.
So do you think maybe in the future
when we have these kinds of gardens,
they will become, I don't know,
the hackers will come and disrupt the 3D printed gardens
and actually put soil in them and grow something else?
So how do you think the culture of gardening,
as the hard work that is rewarding,
will go when this becomes common,
when you can buy your 3D printed garden
and just have it like that?
Is it gonna be a war?
Gardening war?
- Yeah, I can easily see that happening,
like hipsters are going to claim that this is not authentic.
(mumbles)
But, I don't know.
Yeah, I think that it's a valid point.
We're trying to reduce the amount of effort
and the hurdles as much as possible,
and so for people who really enjoy this labor,
there's absolutely no problem with that.
We want to make the whole activity accessible
to people who aren't that into this kind of activity
in the first place.
- [Red Haired Woman] It's a little bit like people
who like to sew their own clothes
and people who like to buy them already made.
- Right, yeah.
- [Red Haired Woman] Great, thank you very much,
and thanks to all our speakers for today's session.
(audience applause)