Small apartment patio garden design ideas

i, like many of you, am one of the two billion peopleon earth who live in cities. and there are days --i don't know about the rest of you -- but there are days when i palpably feel how much i rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. and some days, that can evenbe a little scary. but what i'm hereto talk to you about today is how that same interdependence

is actually an extremelypowerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal someof our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration. a couple of years ago, i read an article by new york timeswriter michael pollan, in which he argued that growingeven some of our own food is one of the best thingsthat we can do for the environment. now at the time that i was reading this,

it was the middle of the winter and i definitely did not have roomfor a lot of dirt in my new york city apartment. so i was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next wired magazine and finding out how the expertswere going to figure out how to solve all these problemsfor us in the future. but that was actually exactly the point that michael pollanwas making in this article --

it's precisely when we hand over the responsibilityfor all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messesthat we see with the food system. so, i happen to knowa little bit from my own work about how nasa has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. and that you can actuallyget optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-qualityliquid soil over plants' root systems. now to a vegetable plant,

my apartment has got to beabout as foreign as outer space. but i can offer some natural light and year-round climate control. fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. and the way it worksis that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquidnutrient solution up to the top,

which then trickles downthrough plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. now light and temperature varywith each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is goingto put in her window farm, and whether she is goingto feed her food organically. back at the time,

a window farm was no morethan a technically complex idea that was going to requirea lot of testing. and i really wanted itto be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastestgrowing areas of patenting in the united states right now, and could possibly becomeanother area like monsanto, where we have a lot of corporateintellectual property in the way of people's food.

so i decided that,instead of creating a product, what i was going to do was open this upto a whole bunch of codevelopers. the first few systems that we created,they kind of worked. we were actually able to growabout a salad a week in a typical new york cityapartment window. and we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. but the first few systems

were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that martha stewartwould definitely never have approved. (laughter) so to bring on more codevelopers, what we did was we createda social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everythingthat was wrong with these systems.

and then we invited peopleall over the world to build them and experiment with us. so actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. and we have window farmsall over the world. what we're doingis what nasa or a large corporation would call r&d,or research and development. but what we call it is r&d-i-y, or "research and develop it yourself."

so, for example, jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumpsinstead of water pumps. it took building a whole bunchof systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cutour carbon footprint nearly in half. tony in chicago has been taking ongrowing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to gethis strawberries to fruit for nine months of the yearin low-light conditions by simply changing outthe organic nutrients.

and window farmers in finlandhave been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the finnish winters by outfitting them with led grow lights that they're now makingopen source and part of the project. so window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning processsimilar to software. and with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concernsof people customizing their systems

for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns. so my core team and i are able to concentrateon the improvements that really benefit everyone. and we're able to look outfor the needs of newcomers. so for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free,very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world,

can build one of these systems for free. and there's a patent pendingon these systems as well that's held by the community. and to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sellto schools and to individuals who don't have timeto build their own systems. now within our community,a certain culture has appeared. in our culture,it is better to be a tester

who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. what we get out of this projectis support for our own work, as well as an experienceof actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than justscrewing in new light bulbs. but i think that eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration.

so she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledgingyou for contributing. if we really want to seethe kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking aboutas environmentalists and food people, maybe we just needto ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the peoplewho are doing stuff. open source projectstend to have a momentum of their own.

and what we're seeing is that r&d-i-y has moved beyondjust window farms and leds into solar panels and aquaponic systems. and we're building upon innovationsof generations who went before us. and we're looking ahead at generations who really need usto retool our lives now. so we ask that you join us in rediscovering the valueof citizens united, and to declarethat we are all still pioneers.

(applause)