Solar-Powered Bike Sharing Farm Is A Mobile Community Garden For The City (Video)

Solar-Powered Bike Sharing Farm Is A Mobile Community Garden For The City (Video)

Kimberley Mok (@kimberleymok)
Design / Urban Design
August 17, 2017

© People’s Industrial Design Office

Our long love for the bicycle extends beyond the two-wheeler itself, spilling over into bike-powered inventions, electricity-generating gyms, even whole buildings designed around the bike.

Seen over at Designboom and created by the People’s Industrial Design Office -- the design arm of Beijing firm People’s Architecture Office -- during a three-day design hackathon in Seoul, South Korea, the Bike Share Farm is a solar-powered and bike-propelled mobile hydroponic garden, inspired by the bike sharing concept. The idea was to bring plant life to the citizenry, the designers say:

Seoul is a massive vertical city with minimal garden space. Mobile farms can make shared urban farming possible in such a dense megacity.

Bike Share Farm has been made with mobility in mind. Using off-the-shelf components, a portable hydroponic system with a series of zigzagging tubes forms a frame into which two different bikes can be slotted as the mobile garden travels from place to place. The hydroponic system's irrigation mechanisms are powered by a series of photovoltaic panels.

The Bike Share Farm is a prototype attempts to tackle the issues highlighted during the hackathon of how to "[share an] eco-city with technology." While there may be finer details to work out (such as factoring in how long it will take the plants to mature before harvesting), one could almost imagine a mobile garden like this bringing 'instant' fresh green produce to food deserts or neighbourhoods lacking community gardens. An intriguing idea as well as a powerful symbol of food security and human-powered mobility; see more over at People’s Industrial Design Office.