Group Maker Lab Project
The Brief
For my group maker project, my team was given a deceptively simple prompt: take a traditional box and hack it into something else.
A box normally does three things — store, move, and hold objects — and then gets thrown away. We wanted ours to do all three and then become a tool instead of waste. That became the Mini Sprout Box: a compact, partially biodegradable planter for growing herbs and microgreens at home.
We built it around four goals: eco-friendly, sustainable, accessible, and low maintenance. Accessibility mattered from the start, so we designed for people for whom gardening is usually hardest for — older adults and anyone with chronic back pain — by keeping it portable and compact enough to use on a windowsill or countertop instead of on the ground. We anchored the project in two UN Sustainable Development Goals, Zero Hunger and Responsible Consumption and Production, working from the figure that 13% of food is lost along the supply chain before it ever reaches anyone
Building The Box
Everything we used was recycled or recyclable, sourced by splitting a materials list across the team.
The build itself is layered. We cut a cardboard shell to size, halved an egg carton for the base, then alternated egg cartons with felt to manage drainage without letting soil escape. A plastic water bottle with holes punched through the cap sits in the soil as a passive self-watering system, which was our answer to the low-maintenance goal — the box handles its own watering between visits.
We documented and digitally archived the whole process, from the first sketches through to the finished top, front, and side views. The prototype worked, but building it surfaced the limit of the design: it tells you nothing. You still have to notice when it needs attention.
Final Product
That gap drove GMP2. Accessibility had been a principle in the first build, but I felt we'd treated it as a feature rather than a requirement — the box was physically easier to reach, and that was it. Someone with vision loss or hearing loss got no more from it than before.
So we added an Arduino layer: a moisture sensor driving both an LED and a buzzer, so the box signals its needs visually and audibly rather than relying on either alone. We prototyped and tested the LED and buzzer functions separately on a breadboard before integrating them. Alongside that we added a drip tray, improved circulation, chose materials that reduce water damage and odours, and gave the box a hand-painted cosmetic upgrade with a QR code on the side.
The QR code links to a Mini Sprout Box community website, which we mocked up in Figma — recipes, gardening tips, DIY guides, and maintenance instructions, so the physical box has somewhere to point people when they want to know more.
The second iteration is where the project matched its own principles. Universal design and open-ended learning were always the stated goals; adding redundant sensory cues is what actually delivered them.