Vertical farms and simplification of food logistics becoming more relevant in our urbanized world.

This is part IV of the series about innovation for sustainable solutions in food productions. Read part I, part II, and part III.

The possibility of keeping up uninterrupted cold chains during transport led to food production being located farther and farther from consumers. Cities became more dependent on their surrounding regions and a culture of heavy food imports emerged.

Nowadays, new ways of producing food have been steadily refined/developed to a point where we are starting to see pioneers of new food production settling right amongst our increasingly densely populated cities. …

Gain back awareness of what food really means

This is part III of the series about innovation for sustainable solutions in food productions. Read part I and part II of the series.

Looking at how to feed more people with fewer resources more sustainably, we’ve taken everything around into consideration and defined five areas of innovation in not only agriculture but also food production and consumption as a whole (read our previous article). Our second concept addresses our thinking: how can we make food a priority again? Not just concerning awareness of quality, but also of its production and background?

Here’s why and how: Track your veggies! Be informed about what you eat from the second it’s planted until it lands on your plate and thereby gain back awareness of what food really means. …

The biological diversity of permaculture is hardly manageable for one farmer but doable for AI and automated machinery.

This is part II of the series about innovation for sustainable solutions in food productions. Read part I.

How to feed more people with fewer resources?

The number of people to feed is increasing rapidly whilst the soil productivity of our earth is in dramatic decline. (read our previous article). How to address this problem? Here is our first idea: AI managed permacultures. The biological diversity of permaculture is hardly manageable for one farmer. But still a doable job for an AI and automated machinery. Here’s why and how:

Modern industrialized agriculture turns out to be quite inefficient after all. The vast monocultures dominating rural areas lack the resilience that biologically diverse ecosystems have to keep pests away and the soil fruitful. …

The oldest challenge of mankind still is one of the toughest — and will get even tougher. Thoughts on what can be next

This is part I of the series about innovation for sustainable solutions in food production.

Today, every second farm in Germany is already using smart technology to face the challenges of a global food production industry. In the following years, agriculture as we knew it will transform fundamentally. Willing or not.

Machine growth is hitting a productivity ceiling, as well as the growth of effective monocultures. Therefore, smaller swarm machines will have to revolutionize agriculture towards a more productive as well as environmentally sustainable industry. Just to name one aspect.

Why change is inevitable? Because our global population is expected to rise to 9.8 Billion people by 2050, and consequently the need for a massive food production increase. Contrary to that, not just environmental conditions like climate change threaten the core of our food production as a whole, but the inevitable degradation of the soil itself. …

Tips and learnings on how to conduct remote research

TEAMS Shanghai acquired a user research project in December 2019, to collect feedback and comments regarding prepared concepts as well as observe current user behaviours with certain products through user diary studies and in-home visits.

After a successful kickstart of the fieldwork outings before the Chinese New Year, the project was invariably affected by the now infamous epidemic, making in-home visits impossible to carry out as initially planned. The future of the project was uncertain. …

Article originally published in German

Everyone is talking about the path to digitalization. And we are already halfway down it. We as people, as employees, as friends, as customers, as an audience, as a company providing services, as a society. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the way people work, shop, purchase, travel, and administrate has been copied from analogue to digital. Machine-readable information, generated in the background of our permanent online activity, is at the core of digitization. Data, i.e. …

Insights from the Cradle to Cradle Congress 2020 in Berlin

Since I got hold of the book “Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the way we make things”[1]in 2009, I have been fascinated by the philosophy that mankind could, in fact, be beneficial for our planet instead of only “less bad”, or as an ultimate goal, climate neutral. As thought-leader Chemist Michael Braungart puts it “A tree is not climate-neutral. It is climate-positive!”. [2] Nobody would consider telling a tree not to produce so many leaves to reduce ‘polluting’ its environment in the fall. The leaves become valuable nutrients for the tree and are also food and habitat for a variety of very useful organisms. This is the way we should look at material streams in our economies. …

Insights from different angles and inspiring points of view

Read part I of the article here

The objects that surround us every day tell the story of our culture, the ideas we live our lives in. Often it is only when we travel and feel the strangeness of a new place that we recognize the differences to the place we left. In this series, we hope to highlight the ways that regional design philosophies can differ, how these philosophies impact the objects we interact with every day, and how they can sometimes be combined to create a truly innovative solution. …