Pebble - The Ritual of Urban Farming

Pebble is a connected tea-growing kit that helps urban residents rediscover the ritual of cultivation — blending technology, culture, and mindfulness to encourage sustainable urban farming habits.

UX Research

Product Design

Zero → One

Project Overview

Client: Boston Mayor’s Office of Food Justice
Industry: IoT · Sustainability · Civic Innovation
Timeline: 4 weeks (2022)
My Role: UX Researcher & Product Designer

The project was created in response to a challenge from the Boston Mayor’s Office of Food Justice:

“How might we grow urban farming in the city?”

Our team designed Pebble as a behavior-change intervention, lowering the psychological and cultural barriers to home gardening. The concept pairs an elegant modular planter with a companion app that supports learning, reflection, and community building.


The Challenge

Urban farming promises environmental and social benefits — reduced food miles, improved air quality, and community connection.
Yet participation remains low due to limited space, cultural hesitancy, and a lack of tangible entry points.

We aimed to reframe urban farming not as labor, but as ritual and pleasure — beginning with something simple, sensory, and universal: tea.

Research & Insights

To understand motivations and barriers, we conducted:

  • Field visits to urban farms in Boston and Providence

  • Interviews with experts such as

    • Prof. Dawn King (Brown University, Environmental Studies)

    • Orion Kriegman (Boston Food Forest Coalition)

    • Rob Elliot (Urban Leaf Co-Founder)

  • Focus groups with novice gardeners


Key Insights

  1. Cultural gap, not technical gap – People admire local farming but feel it “belongs to someone else.”

  2. Space and time anxiety – Urban dwellers fear commitment to plant care.

  3. Need for tangible reward – Sensory outcomes (taste, aroma) motivate sustained participation.

These insights shifted our goal from designing a “smart planter” to designing a ritual system that cultivates mindfulness and pride through small, achievable acts.


Concept & Design Strategy

Pebble transforms daily plant care into a guided, meaningful ritual.
Each stage — planting, nurturing, harvesting, and brewing — is supported by subtle digital cues and communal storytelling.

Core experience principles:

  • Learn by ritual: visual clock and calendar teach natural growth cycles

  • Nurture with feedback: soil sensors and prompts build consistent habits

  • Share the journey: app-based community connects local growers


Prototyping & Iteration

We developed three prototype generations, testing usability, clarity, and emotional engagement.

  • Form exploration – Modular vessel design integrating growth and drying functions

  • Behavioral feedback loop – Responsive prompts based on soil data

  • Community layer – App prototype enabling shared milestones and peer learning

Each iteration incorporated user feedback to refine usability, strengthen emotional connection, and ensure technical feasibility.


The Pebble Experience

  1. Grow – Users plant edible flowers or tea herbs in Pebble’s modular pods.

  2. Care – The device senses soil moisture and light, gently prompting actions.

  3. Harvest & Brew – Once grown, the system guides users to dry and brew the leaves.

  4. Reflect & Share – The companion app visualizes progress and connects users to others, turning gardening into shared mindfulness.

“One plant can’t feed a family, but it can reconnect a city to where food begins.”



Impact & Future Vision

By starting with tea, Pebble connects sustainability, culture, and wellbeing:

  • Promotes biodiversity through small-scale cultivation

  • Encourages mindfulness through the ritual of growth and consumption

  • Builds community via shared urban farming practices

  • Donates proceeds to local food gardens

In future iterations, Pebble could evolve into a network of urban micro-farmers, creating data-driven insights for city food programs.


Reflection

This project reinforced my belief that behavioral change emerges from emotional design — aligning physical products, digital guidance, and social motivation into one seamless system.

Through Pebble, I honed transferable skills in:

  • Systems thinking — connecting policy goals to daily human behavior

  • UX research synthesis — turning interviews into behavioral frameworks

  • Prototyping for experience — testing sensory, digital, and ritual layers together

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