However, a few participants simultaneously valued anonymous engagement and holding community members accountable for the information they provide. One participant explained that they only desired anonymity for sharing their guerilla gardening experiences without being identified for engaging in illegal behavior. This compromise of seemingly conflicting values demonstrates the complex, contextual nature in which participants evaluate their values, and the difficulty of translating those values into contextual goals. To briefly review, the database needs to support the community as it evolves, community members in their acts of quotidianin subordination, and the communities’ values in anti-consumerism, long-term equality, and environmental sustainability.First, participants overwhelmingly desired the database to be available online so that it would support collaborative functionality and could be accessible from multiple devices and locations. Participants valued that an online plant database would support the asynchronous collaboration of aggregating local plant data. On the surface, the “collaboration” motivation for this requirement may seem at odds with the participants’ resistance to engaging via digital technologies that replaced or reduced face-to-face social interaction, plastic grow bag including collaboration. Sharing plant information face-to-face – one person asking another for plant information – primarily occurred between a student and teacher.
However, searching for plant information is better suited as a reference task than a social interaction – if the information is available, it is better for a student to look it up them self then ask an educator to act as a dictionary because an educator can make a larger impact spending that time introducing, explaining, and demonstrating complex concepts. Educators and community members printed or emailed plant lists for their pupils and peers so the pupils and peers had the agency to execute their own queries. The social interaction in searching for plant information occurred because, as explained in section 4.1.3, participants found it difficult to find much of the plant information needed for polyculture design. The plant database facilitates the ability of participants to look up plant information themselves. Many participants thought that the databased should be also accessible offline. Some participants desired device independence and portability because they use multiple devices and may not have internet access when working. For other participants, an “offline” database fulfilled their desire to have personal copy for quick reference, just as they do with the physical plant lists they currently access, carry and share. For these participants logging into an account or connecting to the internet were large enough barriers to discourage regular use. Participants wanted to be able to add plants to the database and modify their attributes. Members of the communities often jotted down notes on the community authored plant lists that elaborated on attribute information or provided new attribute information about the plant. In effect, they wanted to combine their knowledge with that which was already recorded to make a more-complete knowledge base.
To support offline accessibility and the ability to manipulate or arrange the data independently from the online setting, participants suggested an export function. Such a function, some participants envisioned, would enable them to transition exported plant data into personalized plant lists for design projects. Similarly, participants wanted to import large amounts of new or modified data back into the database without entering each individual plant attribute through a GUI. Participants specified two interactions for selecting a plant to include in their design. First, they wanted to search for plants by name, both common and scientific. Often times participants in the process of designing a polyculture already had an idea of a plant they could include in their design and looked it up by name on Google, in a book, or in some other resource to confirm or deny that it is a suitable choice. By allowing participants to search the database by name, they could do the same here. Second, participants wanted to filter plants by attribute such as height and layer. To select a species, participants consulted plant lists that shared some attribute to get a sense for the range of options. These shared attributes ranged from specific, such as “aquaphilic plants specifically for [Live Oak]”, to broad, such as “permaculture plants for temperate climates.” Some participants wanted to the system to automatically recommend companion plants for a plant they were browsing. “Companion plant” is a colloquial term for a plant that provides beneficial functions for another plants. For example, lavender is considered a companion plant for apple because lavender deters codling moths , a destructive pest for apple trees. Participants wanted the database to provide companion plant lists because, in practice, they often consulted companion plant lists for ideas of how to make their design more robust.
Some participants wanted the database to provide a platform for sharing planting, growing, harvesting, and use techniques. These techniques are based on the plant attributes and the specifics of the environment it is planted in or its use context. Although these techniques pertain to the implementation or use of a sustainable polyculture, they were factors considered during participants’ design of sustainable polycultures. For example, participants referred to Toensmeir for his wide range of information about why plants are desirable to include – they are easy to harvest, store, and propagate – and how they can be used, including tips for planting, trellising, pruning, and cooking. Participants referenced Lancaster for water-related specifics of the environment that the plant will be planted in, such as formulas for calculating the water needs of a plant, how to harvest water from a roof, tips for how to plant trees to avoid difficult hole digging in compacted soil, and how to prune trees so that they would cool the temperature of the house in the summer and allow sun to warm a house in the winter. Participants’ wide range of goals for the SAGE Plant Database that are not included in the initial design should still be considered for future work. To support the future development of applications that expand on the SAGE Plant Database, like the SAGE Composer and other applications described in the Prologue, the SAGE Plant Database needs to have an Application Programming Interface . An API is an intermediary that allows applications to interact with each other. Specifically, an API is a set of protocols and tools that, in this case, allows developers to incorporate the information in and functionality of the SAGE Plant Database into other applications. Participants’ use of a wide range of computing devices indicate that the plant database needed to be operable on a range of personal computers with varying levels of performance. Several participants were using old machines that were functional but obsolete by their manufacturers’ standards. However, these participants felt that their computers were still serving their needs and anticipated using their machines until these machines could no longer do so. Often time those machines can only run software that are several years old. Outdated software systems have unaddressed security risks and are missing other features of modern versions. Designing systems to work with older computers and software in addition to modern versions of the same software on modern computers is a substantial challenge. If there is a great enough difference in the software and hardware architecture of old and new computers, there may not be a way to develop a single system that works on the range of machines. The database also needs to allow for privacy by way of anonymous use and contribution so that participants can feel secure in their use of the database while engaging in acts of quotidian insubordination. To support the communities’ anti-consumerism, long-term equality values it must be open-source, thus providing equal opportunity for all people to access the database and its data or copy the platform and transform it into something more suitable for their needs. The platform must also be open-source to allow any community to adopt it and modify it into what their specific community needs. And finally, to support the communities’ values of environmental sustainability, it should have software, network, pe grow bag and hardware architectures that minimizes its environmental footprint in effort to support sustainability.The domain knowledge emerged from six forms of qualitative methods discussed in Chapter 2. The domain knowledge represents the context in which the SAGE Plant Database must function and support. For this line of inquiry, I conducted all analytical coding with the intention of determining domain knowledge for the plant database. Because the community envisioned the database to support sustainable polyculture design, I assessed which plant information was important to participants’ sustainable polyculture design process in the first analysis. The coding process was the same as the process described in section 5.2 with data and materials that were used in, a product of, or described participant’s agroecosystem design process.
The methodological triangulation of these inquiries led to themes for the domain knowledge. I conducted the first phase of coding by listing details in the notes, transcriptions, and artifacts about plants that are interesting or relevant to the design process. After creating this list, I identified two over-arching themes: context-specific characteristics that every plant should have to be a potential candidate for an agroecosystem, and plant properties that participants consider when configuring the functional composition and spatial placement of the agroecosystem. I coded the selected notes, transcriptions, and artifacts twice more, focusing each time on one of the two over-arching themes. I conducted the second phase of coding by writing down every context-specific characteristic that participants use to identify if a plant is a potential candidate for agroecosystems. I assessed that these context-specific characteristics represented four inclusion criteria for which plants should be featured in the database. These inclusion criteria are presented in section 5.3.1. I conducted the third phase of coding by writing down every property of a plant that participants consider when configuring an agroecosystem. I found that these plant properties represented the data property and value fields that make up the plant database object. I grouped these properties into three categories based on the relevance of theproperty in various stages of the agroecosystem design process. These plant properties are presented in section 5.3.2.There were, however, differences in what constituted climate appropriateness, ecosystem services that support the local ecology, and low maintenance because of the differences in the communities’ local ecologies. In other words, a trait that makes a plant low maintenance, for example, for the Manzanita community may not be climate appropriate for the Live Oak community. Such a trait would likely require significant maintenance to survive in the new context, if survival was even possible. The exemplar agroecosystems presented in section 1.1.1 demonstrate the importance of the inclusion properties and how they manifest differently dependent upon the local ecology the sustainable polyculture is designed into.Participants widely agreed that all plants in the database for their community and used in sustainable polyculture design should be climate appropriate. For a plant to be a candidate for an agroecosystem, it must be able to thrive in the local climate and be tolerant to local conditions. For example, a plant must be heat tolerant under the normal and extreme climate conditions in the area. To be heat tolerant, it must not succumb to heat stress, which is “the rise in temperature beyond a threshold level for a period of time sufficient to cause irreversible damage to plant grown and development” . Weiseman, Halsey, and Ruddock explain that “most [plants] are limited to a specific range within a specific biome.” Biomes are “large naturally occurring [communities] of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat” with transition zones instead of boundaries. For example, much of Southern California is a chaparral biome containing interwoven drought-tolerant shrubs and bushes . Participants looked for plants that were well suited to thrive in their respective USDA plant hardiness and American Horticultural Society heat zones, therefore the plant database should include this information. If a plant belongs to that hardiness zone, it can with stand those minimum temperatures without severe damage. A heat zone is defined by the number of days that experience temperatures over 86 degrees Fahrenheit. If a plant belongs to a particular heat zone, then it can survive at least that number of days over 86 degrees. Plants typically belongs to a range of hardiness and heat zones. The Live Oak community, for example, was situated in the USDA plant hardiness zone 9b and American AHS heat zone 9 .