Watering for Community Gardens

The University of Indianapolis (UIndy) has partnered with the Community Health Network (CHNw) to address the food insecurity related issues among the residents of the South Indy Quality of Life Plan (SoIndy) in two community organic gardens. The goal of the Watering for Community Gardens project is to design and construct a watering system for the University Heights community garden. Employing a Design for Six Sigma framework (DFSS) under the DesignSpine™ design model at UIndy, the team began the process by conducting interviews with the client and interns who work in the garden. The Voice of the Customer DFSS tools that were utilized in this project, includes translation worksheets and KJ Analysis. These were used to help solicit and evaluate requirements that were most important to the user. There are four “stage-gate” checkpoints during this process. Our team has completed the first two. The first stage involves interviews with our client to determine functional and non-functional requirements. In the second stage, our team began to ideate and develop designs. After some preliminary designs, the team was able to narrow down to one design. The team decided on 3 designs to present for Gate Review 2. Each of the 3 designs was given design descriptions, and they were a gravity-fed drip irrigation system, an in-soil watering system, and a water pump fed system. Calculations were performed to determine the velocity of fluid flow, the volumetric flow rate, the gallons per day required for