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Project Overview
Can you remember how much rain your garden had in the last week? Knowing this is essential if you're to be able to optimally water your garden.
SmartGardenWatering advises gardeners on saving water in their gardens. Watering advice is easy to offer. But tailoring this advice with knowledge of individual garden types an conditions, as well as knowing the garden's specific location, requires a sophisticated approach. Our iPhone app communicates with our Web app (SmartGardenWatering.org.au)and extracts information about the gardener's previously modelled garden. It then sends watering reminders to gardeners, together with information about recent rainfalls in their suburb.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
The team at design agency Involved (Paul Prickett, Nicholas Bruning and Jordan Lewis) were responsible for the visual design and software development for this project.
The original SmartGardenWatering project was initiated by Geoff Connellan (University of Melbourne). Jon Pearce (University of Melbourne) was project leader for the software development with John Murphy(design4use)as project manager.
Project Brief
Imagine: you've been to the website SmartGardenWatering.org.au and sat in the sun one day to model your garden on your iPad. You carefully selected some drought tolerant plants for your native area using the built-in plant selector and defined a garden area for your roses. You installed the size water tank it recommended would cope with these areas, and obtained a weekly watering schedule. You must water the roses from your tank twice a week; the natives just on Sunday. You won’t forget, will you!
Drip, drip, drip!
You had forgotten! But it’s the gentle alert sound from your iPhone SGW app that prompts you that Sunday has come around again and it’s time to water. The app reminds you that your roses need 45 minutes of watering and the natives just 30. But wait! Didn’t it rain a few days ago? Or was that last week? But you were at work anyway – did you get much rain at home? Not sure.
But a swipe of your finger and there it is: a display of the rainfall for each day of the previous week. And a line on the plot to show you how much rain you needed to satisfy the required 10 mm dose. Ah! You see that there was rain last Wednesday – about 5 mm. That's a bit short of the required 10 mm. So you decide to water for about half the time. Another saving of a scarce resource.
Project Innovation / Need
Victorian dams are about 70% full this winter, but this does not mean we should relax our economical water use – the last time the dams were 70% full was in 1998, and it took only 18 months to drop to 45%!
To address this water saving issue we first created a Web application (http://SmartGardenWatering.org.au) to advise on optimal garden water use with a strong focus on social networking. This application lets gardeners model their garden, choose plants, size a water tank and obtain a watering schedule.
However, we recognised that gardeners don’t sit behind computers all day. So our second development was to complement this application with a companion iPhone app* that extracts data from the Web app and presents it to the gardener as both a reminder to water and information on which garden areas to water and for how long.
Our approach to this problem has been quite innovate in that we have taken scientific data derived from three years of research at the Burnley campus of the University of Melbourne and presented it to gardeners in an engaging and playful manner via the Web app, on desktops as well as tablet devices such as iPad or Android. But then we went further and linked it to an iPhone app that communicates with gardeners ‘on the ground’. Not only can they be reminded about watering as they travel far from home (“No rain and it’s watering day! Eeek! Call home – turn on the taps!”) but they can wander around their garden and see for how long each area needs to be watered and also see recent local rainfalls to decide whether they should vary the amount scheduled.
User Experience
The initial point of engagement for the user is to download the SmartGardenWatering app from iTunes. As they launch this on their tablet or desktop they will immediately see that they need to log into SmartGardenWatering.org.au and model their garden. This has been a very effective strategy to drive people to the Web app, since promoting an iPhone app has much more appeal to people that ‘yet another web site’. Yet when they arrive at the Web site they find a very attractive, engaging application that takes into account a multitude of aspects of their own garden (location, plants, soils, mulches, water tanks, microclimates, etc.) and tells them exactly how often, and for how long, to water each area of their garden.
With a garden modelled, they can rely on the iPhone app to send them an alert each time a watering is due for each area of their garden. It was important to us that the gardener’s engagement with this activity didn’t stop when they walked away from their desktop. Hence, whilst the computer allowed them to carry out the initial modelling tasks that require the features of a large screen, we wanted the convenience of a mobile app to remind them when waterings were due and, most importantly, reflect on what weather events had occurred in their suburb during the past week.
So the combination of the app knowing where the garden is located, and receiving daily rainfall updates from the Bureau of Meteorology, makes this a very powerful aid to saving water in the garden.
Project Marketing
We have taken many approaches to make these resources available and well known to the general public.
We have signed an agreement with savewater!® to host the web site on their server. This is the place that many people go for authoritative advice and information on water, and hence it gives the web site and iPhone app great publicity as well as great sense of authority and respectability.
We have made public appearances in numerous local media and events. For example: the public launch of SmartGardenWatering was held at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (Apr 1, 2011); an article in The Age (May 15, 2012); interview on Hilary Harper’s gardening program on Radio National (Dec, 2011); an article in The Age ‘Voice’ (Jan 13, 2012); an article in Gardening Australia (Jan, 2012) and Australian Horticulture, National (Feb, 2012).
The iPhone app has achieved a ranking of# 34 in the world list of education apps, and it was promoted by Choice Magazine as one of their 4 education apps.
We have numerous articles posted on web sites and web blogs.
We have a Facebook page for the project and have posted and tweeted about its progress.
A significant and highly successful strategy has been to develop the iPhone app as this has driven more people to login and explore the web application. The combination of Web app plus mobile app is a particularly powerful combination.
Home & Garden
This category relates to applications that have been developed for the home and garden, such as DIY, energy and water saving, building, furnishing, home improvements, gardens and outdoor living
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