POWAR - Plant Observatory of Weather Adaptability for Resilience

Useful information

Team members: Pablo Zuloaga
Country: Spain
Keywords: Open Source Digital Fabrication Sustainability Distributed Design Climate Emergency Climate Change STEM education STEM

Short Description

A DIY low-cost climate simulator to experiment the behavior of plants in future predicted weathers.

Detailed Description

POWAR is a box that connects to the internet and downloads real-time data from a weather API and compares it with the information from the sensors inside of it and tries to regulate them to match and replicate in its interior some characteristics like rain, light intensity and temperature from a selected city.

It can be digitally fabricated at any Maker Space or FabLab in the world as it is made primarily from sustainable materials like CNC cut wood and 3D printed parts, and some basic electronic components that can be ordered online.

Its main version is being finished in Barcelona, at the same time that 5 adaptations of it are being built at the IPL and FabLab Benfica in Portugal, in a remote hybrid workshop, and we are also developing a methodology for STEM education with a research institution and an editorial company, to teach climate awareness to kids and in the future, I hope to build it in rural areas to experiment with food growing and empower small-holder farmers with data.

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?

The project main focus are on the next SDG´s:
2 - Zero Hunger.
4 - Quality Eduction.
11 - Sustainable cities and Communities.
12 – Responsable Consumption and Production.
13 - Climate Action...
15 – Life on Land

Making smallholder farmers more resilient to climate change by giving them the ability to experiment today with the effects of future predicted climates in their specific region on agriculture.

POWAR also intends to bridge the technology education gap between the urban and rural population, while teaching children how to grow food and the effect climate change will have on our food security from a young age to generate awareness in them.

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: POWAR is mainly fabricated in wood and 3D printed PLA to be sustainable from its fabrications, and reuses the same water in a circular way. Even dough, our next iterations are going to include the use of solar panels to make it more climate efficient.

Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?: POWAR is Open Source and can be Digitally Fabricated in any maker space or fablab in the world. Right now they some product design students in Lisbon are building some adaptations of it with different technologies, in a hybrid remote workshop we did from Barcelona.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?

POWAR promotes more sustainable agriculture practices in smallholder farmers and wants to empower them with data that makes them more resilient to climate change, and that could also be used by them to demand their governments for better climate policies.

At the same it is meant to teach kids climate awareness by giving them a better overview of the Climate Emergency effects in our food security, so they become more conscious planet inhabitants.