Eevi – A convenient, highly accessible, and aesthetic way to add your favourite tastes and essential vitamins and minerals to your life – 365 days a year fresh leafy greens and herbs at home. Eevi is a sustainable indoor garden pillar which brings the worlds variety of flavours right into your comfort zone.

The project resulted from 7 years of city-rooftop gardening problems, limited and unsustainable supply of fresh, nutritious, and tasty food plants from an overwhelmed global food supply chain and supermarkets closing hours, as well as dark winters. After 4 years of experience in vertical indoor farming in their apartment for self sufficiency, due to increasing interest by friends and after 250+ interviews, they decided to build a product for the market.

Eevi is a solution by Vipul Khatana and Hans-Henning Boerstinger, designed and developed from scratch at Happylab Vienna. Within the Distributed Design Program 23/24, we placed circularity and convenience at the core of the supply chain.

Designed by, and for busy urban citizens, Eevi combines high quality light and fresh ingredients in your living space, intuitively including them into your daily routines – the tasty topping and little extra in terms of health for your snacks, self-prepared meals, or delivery food. With its automated watering cycles, the plants are well supplied for 18 – 21 days, giving lots of room for peace of mind and holidays – and a refill-notification when the time is due. It is also the cheaper and more environmentally friendly choice, compared to the local supermarket, not only because of its reusable substrate.

Project’s approach

With the worlds globalised supply chain, shipping and proceeding fresh plant products in a gigantic and heavily energy consuming infrastructure just does not add up – not for fresh food-plants – especially international/exotic herbs – with a short shelf life, drastically losing nutrition on their way that are essential for a healthy lifestyle. Within the DDP 23/24, next to the MVP of an Eevi Garden we developed a manufacturing- and logistic-approach that aligns with the farm-to-fork concept by minimising the time and transportation from production site to consumer.

At Happylab we builded Eevi and prototype-machinery that allows for a scalable, semi automated manufacturing of our Eevi in combination with, e.g. a small workshop, comparable to your friendly maker space located within your city. Rather than shipping a centralised manufactured product, sending the design to a local allows a production close to the consumer.

With our hybrid of hydroponics and a drip irrigation system Eevi is using up to 90% less water and nutrition than traditional agriculture needs, while providing more harvest on a smaller utilised area than comparable systems. Therefore, scarce resources are more efficiently and environmentally friendly used. By using recycled acrylic glas, we make sure that most of our Eevi can be upcycled, reused, or refurbed.

About the creative talents

Vipul Khatana was born in the north of India, graduated with a Btech in electrical engineering and has a focus on machine learning. Hans-Henning was born in the north of Germany, studied international business administration to understand the world we live in, and developed a focus in food and service.

They met in Vienna, lived together, and have a passion for outdoor-activities, often related to sports and nature. At the Makerspace Happylab – where they lately spend most of their time – they got into CAD/CAM software, Acrylic and metal laser cutting, cnc, 3D printing, metal- and woodwork.

They are open to collaborate with a talented designer for Eevi’s Evolution.