2013

THEUNIS SNYMAN ID4

Saving Up for the SUmmer!

A project about making rainharvesting visible. A story about conservation and the struggle between the tap and the clouds!

Table of contents1. My Design Philosophy

2. Problem identification

3. Grad Direction

4. Opportunity spaces

5. Gardens

6. Institutions

7. Research and findings

8. Recommendations to Emily Carr Univesity

9. Bosa Properties Brief.

10. Modelling and early prototyping

11. A brush with Self watering planters

12. BOSA Proposal denied

13. Cultivate is Born

14. Thesis Project #2 Queensbury Garden

15. Prototyping

16. Research Biomimicry

17. Precedents

18. Analysis of precedents

19. Design intentions

20. Rebrief

21. Storyboarding

22. Sketch models

23. Model analysis

24. Sketching

25. 3d iteration

26. Mechanicals

27. Prototyping

28. Scale models wings

29. Wing iterations and analysis

30. Prototyping of parts

31. Manufacturing processes

32. Testing of prototype

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What does design mean to me?To me design is an act of problem solving. My father is a journeyman auto electrisian and has a great saying that goes something like this “if it doesnt fit, modify it.” It is with this philosophy he left me as someone who continiously solve problems from a micro level and moving on to bigger problems a little at a time. I believe anyone who has altered or reconfigured a problem to solve it is a designer by definition. Design is just an act of modification. The alternative to design is invent in which you see a need no else has and modify materials to make something no one has ever seen. I live between these two ideas. I believe that I am just a generalist trying to focus on something tangible. A “jack of all” trying to find something to be better at than other things

Why am I here?My Goals with this degree has been first and foremost to finish something I started and prove to myself that I can do it. I will not work as an industrial designer but as a problem solver. I will be trying to find bigger problems to solve and working toward a sustainable life for myself and if I am very lucky, for others too.

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Irresponsible Consumption

Increasing Urban Agriculture demand for water in the city

• Water is abundant in the winter in Vancouver but in the summer there is about a month or so that it doesn rain. It is only COMMON sense that we should be saving the water and conserving it for growing gardens and vegetable and save the energy intensive , chlorinated and treated drinking water. The Germans must be laughing at us when they watch us wate everything

• The city engineering struggles with the sheer volume of the rain and needs all the help they can get in delaying water to go in the storm sewers. Outfalls overflow and

• Rainharvesters installed on downspouts can reduce the amount of water that goes into the stormsewers during rainstorms.

We waste too much water in this country.

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n Areas of interest.Rainharvesting and water conservationI was interested in looking at water conservation and making the act of rainharvesting more visible and interseting by designing a capturing device that wil ask a question and raise awarenes through interseting conversations.My initial direction was to look at Emily Carr university water usage and define strategies to reduce the use. Areas were identified but due to new campus investigations and billing procedures the project was shortlived.

My next direction was working with the CULTIVATE group to respond to an arts call for the BOSA development group. We spent a month and a half working on the proposal to design and build the space. The space was to include a rainharvesting element and this was where my direction was heading. Unfortunately we did not win the bid and the Project was cancelled. As Cultivate we decided to proceed and find a space where we can still build a garden and implement all of the planning we had previously made.

During the Cultivate collaborative I started looking at the urban agriculture platform and community Gardens to look at how they are using water in their context. I am now actively involved in the building of a sharing garden in North Vancouver in which the RAINSCAPE will live. I am the designer for the rainharvesting system and is part of the fundraising initiative for the space.

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vancouver’s precipitation over the last year

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With the rainfall so high in BC there is a clear opportunity to conserve water during the rainy season and use it for the dry months to irrigate any food gardens it might want to grow. Rainwater is pure and chemical free and there no additives in it that would leach into the food it grows

Raincollection has several problems still and there are several legislative issues with rainharvesting

Abundance of rain

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simpleThis is water from the bathtub, rigged to go to a hose that will soak the garden, my mom is watering the gardenfrom that hose. We her in Vancouver just have to plug into the downspout to ge acces to this abundant resource to save for the summer, wether you are an occasional gardener or a greenthumb.

I come from a country where water has been a scarcity for a long time and conservation has always been part of my lif. Interesting fact. In the city that I live in, the water that you drink, at an average has been through a human bladder seven to nine time.

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Usage rough statistics

Departmental innefficienciesThe initial research led me to believe that • I need to audit the use of water in the different departments to find out how

the school uses water and where there can be areas of improvement. I tried to get water counters installed into the ceramics and scyulpture areas but it would have cost the school money and due to funding the research could not preceed.

• Hardware changes needed to be made to force the use of less water• Behavior change needed to happen to get students to consciously use water

wiser• CMHC doesnt measure the usage on a regular basis to be able to see a

change in usage of any significance. • Areas of concern was the ceramics mixing room, claywashing stations and

plaster room.

Every 8.5 seconds, a 1.25 liters of water gets dispersed from the tap.So per minute there is a dispersal rate of 8.8 liters of waterEvery 5 minutes 44.1 liters gets wasted

One mixing cup takes about 3 minutes to clean. In 3 minutes 25 liters of water gets wasted. That’s equivalent to 51 bottles of water.

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Abandon ProjectDue to all of the problems attached to the water problem at Emily carr I chose to persue the problem in another Context.

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nSPeople+ Water usage in the ceramics area is at a premium and students use water without much regard for the quantity they are wasting. Signage and materials that offers information and encouragement for water useage reduction would be an initial step I would recommend. Offer basic statistics on their own usage and then challenge them to reduce those numbers.

Equipment

+ Footpedallled water activated taps might be a great way to reduce water running constantly and might facilitate reduction without behavior change.

+ The ceramics area could benefit from a high powered cup washer to clean out the containers they utilize to mix their pigment

+ Water Counters at the taps might be helpful.

+ Low flow taps in areas where they make sense would help reduce the consumption

Technology and infrastructure.+ Reverse osmosis machine is a long term investment that could facilitate a raincollection system and augment a great amount of water for human consumption and for industrial use.

+ Raincollection tanks should be installed on the downspouts and used filtered for industrial use.

MeteringGet the water metered on a more regular basis rather than yearly to see consumption trends

ConclusionThe School administration needs to see rainharvesting and water conservation as a nessecity rather than a luxury to aviod. The sustainability of the campus can be measured on its water consumption on its own and a major opportunity exist in this problem space. As a student here at Emily Carr in my Graduation year I chose not to persue this problem space as the inherent “red tape and politics” I encountered toward conservation was just not worth at the time so I chose to take a different strategy in my approach toward conservation of water. I chose to look at raincollection methodologies and spaces.

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lAnswering BOSA Properties artist callThe approaching environmental crisis has catalyzed a widespread momentum around the topicof Urban food systems and farming, waste creation and other issues of human footprint legacies.The “popping up of community gardens all over the city of Vancouver has now spilled into thereal estate development domain in Vancouver .We are answering an artist call for a proposedproject, as a collaboration of five interdisciplinary student of art and design to help design, buildand program and urban food systems in the setting of a new apartment complex development.My focus will be to research the domain of rainwater harvesting and distribution.IntroductionAn artist call has been made to submit proposals to join in a project that will combineart,design,urban agriculture and programming in a new apartment building development Southeast False Creek. The project brief calls for a combination of initiatives to support growing,gathering and sharing food at a new condominium. It also describes the need to addresssustainability in the form of possibly a rain harvesting and or educational aspect.Context considerationsThe development will be situated on the Quebec and 2nd ave block in Vancouver. This area isdeclared as a heritage site and has been classified a transportation history(railway andmotorway)area and should carry some of those elements in the final design. It is very close toa major intersection of Main and Terminal which is a space where many people congregate,some form marginal communities of the DTES. It is also very close to Telus Science world froma geographical point of reference.The area is predominantly a space where the Railway services of Vancouver existed as a largepresence in the area.Design ObjectivesThe project is to take the traditional methods of rain harvesting and community gardening, uprootit into the lens of the viewer and ask some questions about our conservation culture. My projectis to design a public installation at this site that will harvest, educate, store and irrigate thehuman imagination.The installation should show what it does, how it does it and make people understand why itsdoing it. It has to make people think about and understand the process just by looking at it. Itmust make them want to investigate the act of rainwater harvesting, growing food and sharingknowledge by seeing the system as part of a system.The aim of this project is bring the most ubiquitous substance on the planet [water]and use itas an educational tool and to consciously conserve it to feed the garden as part of theprogramming to the rest of the project.

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eD Back to the Drawing board.Unfortunately, that didn’t work out exactly as planned. But we persevered! We had a team potluck where we discussed what we’d learned together and the progress we’d made, and while the opportunity remained to continue with the original space design, we decided that it was more important to us to get our ideas on the ground, than to create a conceptual design.

So we began exploring other options. We still wanted to transform a space and generate local food assets. We looked at residential, hospitality and educational options.

Finally, we decided on a small business. S’Wich cafe, a small coffee shop on the north shore with an underused yard space in back, became a bright spot in the Cultivate story. Switch is a community oriented business with a mandate of sustainability, a perfect opportunity to put our ideas into action.

The space seemed a perfect fit within the YWCA Harvest Share Capital model, a tool used to evaluate the viability of space for food production.

For the S’wich Cafe space, we looked at existing physical elements like square footage and rooftop downspouts,

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eBased in Vancouver, BC –Cultivate is a graduation project by four students from Emily Carr University of Art and Design that aims to help grow the connection between community building and food by creating opportunities for collaborative gardening on a neighbourhood scale.

LearnOur goal is to bring communities together to build skills, friendships, and promote a healthy lifestyle by inspiring people to make more informed deci-sions about their food.GrowOur vision is to transform orphaned or underused spaces into engaging and sustainable gardens to foster the building and growth of a strong commu-nity.ShareThrough each garden we build, we wish to give back to the community by donating fresh organic produce to local social ventures.

Evaluate: Survey the landMeasuring the physical, natural, human, knowledge, social, and financial capital of an underused or orphaned space helps to evaluate the viability of a collaborative garden project.

Connect: Nourish key relationshipsDeveloping relationships with local urban agriculture organizations and social ventures is a big part of the stewardship plan for a Cultivate garden and helps to shape the day to day activity of the space.

Engage: Take root in the communityAll members of the neighbouring community become stakeholders in a Cultivate garden and are involved in planning, installation and operations to varying degrees.

Design: Plot out space and systemsBased on community feedback, the landscape plan, budget, wish list and fundraising initiatives are created to get the project on the ground.

Support: Grow into the futureAs a garden grows, so does the need for organization and structure. Cultivate facilitates programming, scheduling and management of a garden to ensure project sustainability and stewardship.

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Queensbury GardenS’Wich Cafe has a mandate to include a focus on sustainability, community and integrity by using whenever possible locally sourced and environmentally responsible products. To support this mandate, Cultivate hopes to transform the underused yard space behind S’Wich Cafe into a venue for food production and community events. This will necessitate a unique, volunteer-run system that contributes fresh produce to a local social venture, and facilitates events such as educational workshops, harvest dinners for the community and more. That’s why we have decided to partner with the Edible Garden Project.

Through their backyard sharing gardens, the Edible Garden Project provides thousands of pounds of fresh produce every season to the to Harvest Project and directly to residents of social housing complexes on the North Shore.

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iefIn this rebrief I am choosing to explore the act of rainharvesting in the context of a community garden. In this case the product wil live in the SWICH Garden in North Vancouver.

The project is to take the traditional methods of rain harvesting and community gardening, uproot it into the lens of the viewer and ask some questions about our conservation culture. My project is to design a public installation at this site that will harvest, educate, store and irrigate the human imagination.

The installation should show what it does, how it does it and make people understand why its doing it. It has to make people think about and understand the process just by looking at it. It must make them want to investigate the act of rainwater harvesting, growing food and sharing knowledge by seeing the system as part of a system.

The aim of this project is bring the most ubiquitous substance on the planet [water]and use it as an educational tool and to consciously conserve it to feed thegarden as part of the programming to the rest of the project.

This Project will consist of a capturing surface and a storage container and the distribution is suggested for the use late in the process book

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