KaiZen

KaiZen

Team members

Jack Ng Guang Jie (EPD), Yip Jun Han (ISTD), Timothy Chu Sin Hock (ESD), Lee Yu Hui (EPD), Quek Jian Wei (EPD), Clarence Toh Jun Wen (ESD), Yeo Kai Lin (ASD)

Instructors:

Peter Jackson, Kenneth Joseph Tracy, Yang Hui Ying, Pawel Szalachowski

Writing Instructors:

Grace Kong

Teaching Assistant:

Pheh Ying Hong

Problem: A garden that does not grow

Initiated by Metta Welfare Association, Metta Care was established in 2014 to provide F&B vocational training for Metta School graduates aged 18 and above, with mild intellectual disability and/or autism. Metta Care's mission is to provide an avenue for these youths to acquire vocational work and life skills through our comprehensive training and development programmes and to create employment opportunities to help them achieve economic independence and self-reliance.

Metta Café located at 32 Simei St 1, Metta Building, serves healthy and delicious vegetarian meals prepared by their chefs and apprentices and is open to the public. In an attempt to diversify the café's vegetables supply and empower their apprentices to learn how to grow and harvest their own vegetables, Metta Café set up a rooftop garden earlier this year. However, due to environmental factors such as heat and insufficient knowledge about gardening, they were not able to grow much vegetables from their soil-based garden.

Solution: An inclusive vegetable growing system
To address the issues faced by Metta Café, we needed a solution that was simple to use and effective in providing consistent harvests.
The solution came in the form of a growing system designed based on hydroponics, which are water-based agricultural techniques. Hydroponic systems are clean, easy to use and can provide consistent yield.
Taking into account our users' needs, our solution consists of three growing systems based on the nutrient film technique (NFT). Two systems were collaboratively-designed with a hydroponics industry stronghold, AmHydro, while the remaining system was a DIY system designed by us.
The DIY system also comes with various features that improve the user experience of our solution, such as a web application that provides a broad overview of processes happening in the system.

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As the project is designed with inclusiveness in mind, any of the users in Metta Café will be able to use the system with ease. This opens up the opportunity for Metta Café to educate their students and apprentices with special needs on hydroponics.

In turn, it also creates the opportunity for Metta Café to empower the students and apprentices with skills related to farming, opening up the opportunity for them to work in farms in the future.

Having our project in the public view helps make Singapore become a more inclusive society. Located in an area visible to the public, our project also serves as an avenue for the public to better understand the abilities of the special needs community in Singapore.

The project may have ended, but the green movement at Metta Café has just begun.