Bowery Farming: A New York based vertical farming and digital agriculture company with farms in New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
Product designer, 2021- 2023. I led the design of various features and services touches full lifecycle of indoor agriculture, including climate control, farm throughput optimization, and agricultural R&D. Most of my projects integrate sensors, hardwares, computer vision, automation and robotics.
The physical and digital processes in CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) space are immensely complex and dynamic. My work orchestrates the interconnected systems, processes and interfaces in producing, and selling the end products - salad greens. For example, for a seeded plug making its way from a seeding machine to the shelf in local Whole Foods - the digital experience touches enforcing seeding compliance, controlling grow conditions, providing flexible pricing structure, and streamline logistics operation.
Below are a selection of projects highlight various aspects of my work there.
Service Blueprint
Creating a common view of end-to-end operations that surfaced improvements, reduced redundancies, and informed product opportunities across teams
Role: Design lead, partnered with product to facilitate cross-functional working sessions and synthesized output
How
We ran a multi-day offsite with SME from various teams. We post it- ed all the events on crop lifecycle, both in the physical and tech space
I translated it into a service blueprint, visualizing how the front stage (physical space) works in accordance with the backstage ( various HMIs and data services), providing us with a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes, seen and unseen to the people interacting with it.
Task management
Role: sole product designer.
I audited all the facility workflows. Designed a number of new featured, driving production efficiency and overall throughput at the farm.
Projects including case auditing, order delivery and route planning, and transplanting different stage of crops and more
Workflow to transplant crops
In this project we developed a scanner workflow to move crops from one tray to another as they enter grow stage
Processing room in a farm
Cleaning water
Role: Sole product designer. I worked closely with farm design and external vendors, to design workflow and interfaces enabling operations to regularly clean the pipes. Digitally it involved enabling operators initiate, control and monitor the cleaning process
We were able to safely cleaning the pipes at a regular cadence, and further improve yield and diversity product portfolio (certain crops are more sensitive to water quality than the other)
