Our group had to create two project related to the followig subject: Manage natural resources in a sustainable way.
It comes from the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal number 12, which is entitled “Responsible consumption and production".
We started exploring these subjects by focusing on projects that use either API, Database or AI as a technology. Among all the project we shared, two were about water.
Project 1 : CleanWaterAI was an AI system, connected to a microscobe that helps municipalities and utilities to detect if any source of water was infected by any type of bateria.
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See more information on CleanWaterAI Website.
Project 2 : The WIPO GREEN database provides technologies for improved water resource management including water treatment solutions, desalination systems, water resources assessments, and coastal protection methods.
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See more information on WIPO GREEN Website.
We decided to focus on “Water” as natural resources to manage in a sustainable way.
We needed to define a research question for a two projects. To do so, we started a methodology that will help us find this problematic. We defined every beneficiaries, users and external actors related to “Water”.
It led us to the following research question: How could farmers optimize their use of water all year long?
We then, started to work on two different projects related to our problematic:
Project 1: Once farmers collected rainwater and sea water, a company will provide a service to indicated if the collection of water is usable for their farm or not. We thought to use the same system of CleanWaterAI for this project. However, an another feature would be that in a case if the source of water was infected, the system will provide a list of treatment, supervised by a specialist, in order to treat the water.
Project 2: We wanted to create a database that will help farmers to optimize their use of water according to previous months. Indeed, we imagined that an AI would be able to estimate an amount a water necessary for a specific month based on previous result, the water, the humidity level, the dryness...
The next step was to decide with which project we will proceed with user test.
After discussing with our project supervisor, we decided to proceed with the second project but in a different way than expected.
We thought that if would be more interesting to help farmers optimize their use of water thanks to an electronic water distributor connected remotely to an app.
The idea was to have a system of underground pipes that will distribute water once the farmer will ask for it and once it is necessary. Thanks to a sensor that would detect the level of humidity, an API that will collect information about the weather and a definition of a specific soil plot, the system will be intelligent enough to know if the plot needs to be watered or not.
Thanks to a sensor that would detect the level of humidity, an API that will collect information about the weather and a definition of a specific soil plot, the system will be intelligent enough to know if the plot needs to be watered or not.
As we can see on the image, the watering process of plot A is almost done. But because of different factors (weather, humidity, type of soil), it needs to be watered again.
More than managing water distribution, we wanted farmers to manage their farm as well. Therefore, we thought about a farm management app connected to an electronic water distribution system that we record information about each plot of the farm.
The objective was to help farmers doing their job, and provides a complete service all in one app.
We started prototyping these four step of the project and made a first user test:
Name: Stanislas Breguet
Age: 23
Profession: Student
Date of the
interview: 21/11/2022
Name: Moundhir Boussouf
Age: 24
Profession: Student
Date of the
interview: 22/11/2022
We wanted our user to test four main steps:
VIDEO OF 1ST PROTOTYPE
VIDEO OF 1ST PROTOTYPE
Name: Yani Allouche
Age: 22
Profession: Student
Date of the
interview: 22/11/2022
Name: Kate Toporowski
Age: 23
Profession: Student
Date of the
interview: 22/11/2022
VIDEO OF 2ST PROTOTYPE
VIDEO OF 2ST PROTOTYPE
After reviewing all the feedback and the prototype with our supervisor, we could improve our last prototype version into a better qualitative app:
