Design Project 1 | Domain / Area of Opportunity

Please describe a domain or an area of opportunity that you’d like to use as the focus for the design of a PRODUCT that supports or promotes sustainable behaviors and practices for INDIVIDUALS in day-to-day use.

For this first design project, focus your thinking on:

• a PRODUCT --  something physical that can be manufactured, distributed, purchased, and potentially held in your hand or carried with you.

Please share your initial thoughts in a few paragraphs below…

The domain that I’d like to focus on is….

Irrigation systems and water reusability for the purpose of agriculture, motivated by the discussion within this paper—

Weak and Strong Sustainability of Irrigation: A Framework for Irrigation Practices Under Limited Water Availability

Agriculture strongly relies on irrigation. While irrigated land accounts for roughly 20% of the global cultivated area, it contributes to about 40% of crop production. In the last few decades, the growing demand for agricultural commodities has translated into an increasing pressure on the global freshwater resources, often leading to their unsustainable use. Here we investigate the sustainability of irrigation, balancing farmers' profit generation objectives and the needs of ecological systems. We ask the question “sustainability of what?” to stress how the sustainability of irrigation is often evaluated with respect the opposing needs of humans and nature. While from the farmers' perspective irrigation is sustainable when it provides uninterrupted access to water resources at a price not exceeding the marginal revenue they generate (clearly without accounting for environmental externalities), from the standpoint of water resources, irrigation is sustainable if it does not deplete freshwater stocks or environmental flows. We invoke the notions of “weak” and “strong” sustainability to develop a novel framework for the evaluation of tradeoffs between human needs and the conservation of natural capital. Through the analysis of criteria of performance, we relate water deficit and irrigation overuse to the reliability and resilience of irrigation. This approach is applied to the case of Australia, a major agricultural country affected by water scarcity. The application of the ...

www.frontiersin.org

This area is important/interesting to me because….

Growing up in Southern California, the local news was always plagued with drought warnings and declarations to reduce water usage (most memorably the rally to limit shower times to 4 minutes). As such, much of my life was enveloped in this sentiment that water was an extremely sparse resource and that without proper management and control, it’s finite supply would inevitably run dry. Since moving out of my hometown and exploring other parts of the US, I’ve remained closely tied to this notion. But more broadly my interest has expanded beyond that of just shorter showers, but how irrigation systems can be engineered more efficiently to allow for a more sustainable framework. Especially given the amount of agriculture output produced by California (over 1/3 of vegetables and 3/4 of fruits in the US), the environmental performance of such systems can have massive impact on reducing our carbon footprint.

Each sprinkler system = 1200 W/hr

Each sprinkler head has watering radius = 15 sqft

27M acres of cropland in CA = 1.17612e+12 sqft

Approximate # of sprinklers needed = 1.17612e+12 sqft / 15 sqft = 78408000000 sprinklers

Running one sprinkler for 1 hr/day = 78408000000 sprinklers * (1200 W/hr/sprinkler) * 365 hr = 3.43e14 W

Colin’s Comment: Interesting that you mention “shorter showers” because I think the Stanford residences installed low-flow shower heads some time ago and there was a rebellion. Have you noticed irrigation around you on or near campus in the past couple of days? Or maybe an opportunity for smart irrigation?