The Problem

People who lead busy lives (parents, professionals) who also own plants often find their plants taking the back seat, so to speak, to their other responsibilities. In order to fully meet customer requirements, a design must have an automatic watering schedule, its own water source, have a water volume setting, be only marginally larger than the pot itself, and not need a plug. Additionally, the design should be cheaper than plants bought from a nursery, shouldn’t be distracting, should be durable but have replaceable parts, should alert customers to water levels, and be easily hidden if necessary. I believe my presentation does a good job explaining the potential of my automatic plant waterer, and that a customer would be intrigued by my design.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

The entrepreneurial mindset is uniquely different to the original mindset engineers had. The mindset used to be “build a product and the customers will come”, and now the mindset is to isolate a customer problem and then solve that problem. Originally I interviewed my mom and my sister, who both enjoy growing plants to different levels of success, then compared them to my own experiences growing plants. I compared all of our busy lives and considered that might be the issue with successfully growing plants, and started creating designs that require minimal customer input. For people who tend to kill plants instead of growing them, I believe this is a very good, scalable solution that many people could benefit from. I also believe there are some people who want to own plants but aren’t good at watering their plants, or are too busy, or travel too much for work, and therefore don’t even bother. This product could be a solution for all of them. I also believe there is environmental value to this, as there’s less water waste, due to only the exact amount of water needed is used.

The Experience

The design process is a useful and interesting process, from brainstorming to learning different methods of choosing the best design (AHP and the design matrix). The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was quite interesting to learn about, I enjoyed being able to quantitatively evaluate subjective criteria. The design I ended up using didn’t change too much from idea to final solution, as overall it was a simple solution that just needed to be created. I did enjoy learning the iterative process and how to apply it to different designs.

Future Uses

I can absolutely imagine myself using this process in the future for many different thing in my day to day life, related or unrelated to engineering. I imagine I’ll use the AHP and design matrix to help solve problems at my current job, which is training. I can use the AHP and decision matrix to decide which process to train my trainees on first, as well as the relative importance of each process. I can use the design process to decide how to paint my house and how to rearrange my rooms. I can’t wait to use this as an engineer and find solutions to bigger, more real world problems, like using neural engineering to isolate the best solution for dementia patients or students struggling with depression.