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La Grangette - Pininfarina

La Grangette

An extraordinary home gardening living experience.
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  • Kategorie
    Experiential
  • Kunde
    La Grangette
  • Ort
    Verdene, FR
  • Jahr
    2020
The most innovative means to help you take care of your plants and your own health.
The project

An extraordinary home gardening living experience

With the mission of providing fresh, locally grown products while respecting the planet, the La Grangette provides the most innovative means to help you take care of your plants and your own health.

Starting from the idea of innovating in the domain of agriculture through tech, and the founder family heritage of sustainability and caring, La Grangette was shaped around as the only hydroponics home gardening device with AI at its core. Pininfarina supported La Grangette end-to-end, by defining the most desirable value proposition in respect to viable maket positionings, across all phases of the product development all the way to a successful market entry strategy.

All throughout the journey, the product, service, interface and business design iterations had been supported by regular user-evaluation sessions, both via tangible and intangible (digital and VR) mock-ups. At the end of this first phase of a long journey, Pininfarina shaped with La Grangette all the tools necessary to support the startup fundraising process and business interactions with investors.

The journey so far

Providing value through design

‘Design’ is the world of the possible and is concerned about how things could be or ought to be, as opposed to the ‘Sciences’, which are concerned about how things are. The beauty of a design solution is relevant only when it materialises, gets traction and can effectively provide value to end-users (or in other words have an impact).

Therefore, design is set to be a constant and intentional act of balance between aesthetics, technology and business drives. With this willful act in mind, the journey was structured around a series of 4 loops, aiming at narrowing progressively down the level of resolution of the La Grangette home gardening experience:

Iteration 1: user modelling, UX/CX movies, business modelling and user evaluation

We initiated the ideation work through a collaborative workshop with La Grangette, aimed at defining user personas and their journey as users and as customers, providing high-level answers to understand how they would order new seeds, grow them and harvest the plants.

Back to our Pininfarina HQ in Cambiano, we crystallized 3 contrasting experiences into 3 concept movies that were then shown to potential users to gather their feedbacks. In parallel, we explored at a high level the definition of 3 different business models to gauge what would it take to bring such a product/service to the market.

Iteration 2: high-level functional requirements, interaction paradigm, low-fi mockups, and user evaluations

As a result of the first loop, we detailed the first round of functional requirements, between needed and nice-to-have-features. On these, we explored service blueprints starting investigating what was the design package, the service package and the interaction between the two and the digital world.

All of this was again made tangible for the user in a VR model, a physical low-fidelity mock-up and a digital, mobile mock-up. The three of them combined were used again to gather insights from the users in another evaluation round.

Iteration 3: detailed functional requirements, industrial, service and detailed interaction design, high-fi virtual physical and digital mockups, and user evaluations

These feedbacks were used to build the brand values, detailing what the product should and should not represent. Building on in, a full round of industrial design, service refinement and interaction design was carried to bring La Grangette as close to reality as possible.

During this phase the interaction with the mock-ups was more realistic, allowing users to pull the shelves, plant salads and engage the object through a digital interface. VR complemented the experience using sound and images to simulate also those features too expensive to be fully built, thus permitting users to assess and compare a broad range of different solutions and features.

Iteration 4: component and supplier search, pre-engineering and design refinement, marketing package and detailed business modeling

The detailed feedback gathered at this point were redirected to define the go-to-market strategy: together with the client, we identified supplier and components refining the costing side of the equation and pre-engineering the product, built the sets of necessary assets for the marketing and the funding campaigns, as well as building the full business case, including P&L and detailed cash-flow.

Next steps

Pininfarina is now performing an artistic direction over the construction of the first fully functioning units, which will be soon ready for the market test.

The idea

Deliver a unique and smart way to grow plants

The La Grangette hydroponics home gardening experience is a new and interacting way to discover the pleasure of growing fresh products in the heart of your kitchen.

The extraordinary smart technology of La Grangette allows to grow plants for food use without wastes, recreating the optimal conditions for each of them to reach full maturity. The interaction system designed by Pininfarina allows users to interact with the device through a system of lights and colors that activates in a smart way, guiding them during the various phases of the life of the plants, thus indicating the most favorable position for a healthy growth or the perfect moment for harvesting.

The gardening experience can also be completed through the use of an app, which provides more precise information about the life and cultivation methods of the seedlings, as well as tips and nutritional information useful in order to plan a conscious diet.

A complete ecosystem that ensures a seamless interaction that takes care of every aspect of the experience; from planting, auto-growth monitoring and harvesting, to ordering seed refills, to auto-cleaning.