FreshWise Farms

Today we took a visit down to our client Freshwise Farms. The farm is striving to create a educational space or class room to teach the people about the process local farmers use when they grow there food, how its processed, and how its sold to the local community. The overall goal is to educate visitors on the importance of supporting local organize produce, which supports the local economy as well as provides a more healthy organic product to consumers.

We arrived at Freshwise to meet with Derek our contact at the farm and the educational coordinator that we will be working with throughout the design thinking process. Derek took us through the entire farm and taught us about how Freshwise grows there lettuce plants and herbs via hydroponics and soil beds. Being a greenhouse operation, hydroponics is just one of the ways Freshwise grows there produce. In many cases FreshWise grows many of it plants in hydroponic nurseries and once they are of a certain size they are transplanted into soil in the main greenhouse.

Fresh Wise is completely sustainable. The farm really strives on creating zero waste and it is something that they would like to incorporate in there educational presentation to visitors. But lets start talking about the main reason we are here. Fresh Wise came to our class asking us to create a class room space that could be used to teach visitors about NY state agriculture. What we have to work with is a 25'x60' space in the main green house. The physical attributes for the class room that Derek wanted us to implement included a non-sterile feel, like a typical classroom, and they want it to be interactive and filled with on hand activities catered to show visitors just what goes into the farming process.

After seeing how Freshwise operates and what they were looking at as far of design attributes and functionality we returned to the innovation center and started to brainstorm ideas on how to design a space.We placed all of our notes on a board and grouped them into different categories including, the overall design layout,floor design, walls design, roof design, as well as things that we wanted to see in the room based on the type of activities we thought might be fun to have ( farming and planting activities). As we started our design the group consulted with our professor and came up with the idea of actually designing the space not necessarily over physical attributes we received from Freshwise but around those activities Derek and Freshwise would do with the people who come visit the farm. Our next goal is get in contact with Derek and review the curriculum they plan on teaching which should allow us to design a space that is effective. We plan on also sharing some our the ideas that we came up with during our meeting on Tuesday.