Eimertimer

“EIMERTIMER” is a tool that supports the workers of the solidary mushroom farm caffungo by helping them to keep track of the different production steps the mushrooms are in.

INTRODUCING CAFFUNGO

Caffungo is a low-tech mushroom farm project in Bressanone. The idea behind the project is to collect coffee grounds from local gastronomy and use them as a breeding ground for oyster mushrooms. The huge amount of daily produced coffee waste is still full of nutrients on which oyster mushrooms love to grow on. In that way a circular recycling cycle is created.

Caffungo is a joint venture of the House of Solidarity (HoS) and the farm Bühlerhof in Bressanone and got initiated by the student team Niklas Blum and Julia Maier as part of the second semester of the Eco Social Design master in Bolzano. The initial aim of the project is to generate fair jobs for the inhabitants of the HoS. The HoS is a social organization which has been supporting people in need since 2002. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate in the HoS is rising steadily, especially since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Unequal conditions in the labour market make it even harder for socially disadvantaged people to find fair work.

In order to reintegrate the target group into the local society and change their difficult work situation, it is important to consider the multiple challenges their specific life circumstances imply.
The job the inhabitants of the HoS will be working in should be inclusive, which means without language barriers, easy to learn for people without specific vocational training and it should offer chances for personal and professional development in cooperation with open minded partners.

WHAT IS THE EIMERTIMER FOR?

After developing the idea of a solidary and sustainable oyster mushroom farm in cooperation with the farm Bühlerhof and in order to meet the aspired project goals, we used the course “Social Interaction Design” to simplify the farm work for the workers of the HoS. The “EIMERTIMER” board gives an overview of all mushroom buckets on the farm. Color coded LED-lights for each group of buckets and icons for each production phase show the individual growing processes. Each light accounts for one day in the one-month process. Blinking and color changing LEDs call for action of the worker. Each action can be confirmed by pressing a button at the beginning of the blinking line.

For example, when “bucket A” reached the end of its first phase, which is the mycelium colonizing phase, all the LEDs of this phase light up and change their colors from yellow into green. Icons describe to the user that the bucket now needs to be transferred into the fruiting room. This starts the second phase. To confirm the action of switching the bucket and to start the timer of the second phase, the user needs to push the button once. The LEDs of the first phase will turn off while the LEDs of the second phase will start to shine day by day. With this tool it is easy to keep the overview and the production can be timed and calculated more easily. The visual appearance without the use of much text makes the tool easy to understand and guides the worker of the HoS through the growing process of the mushrooms.