CREO-Tive Solution Boosts Nature in Urban Areas

Aristotle stated that “Man is by nature a social animal.” However, social distancing due to COVID-19 has turned us into increasingly sedentary animals.

“We are living indoors more than ever,” said Hooman Koliji, founder and CEO of California-based green tech company CREO, in an interview with engineering.com. “These are harsh environments with a lack of resources in terms of adequate light and temperature for plants to grow.”

The pandemic has also turned the usual order of the world upside down. “People have become more conscious about food security, supply-chain security, and clean food,” noted Koliji. 

Koliji was a tenured professor of architecture at the University of Maryland, where he interacted regularly with plant scientists, biologists and engineers to understand the best methodology of integrating nature with the built environment. Unfortunately, growing plants in buildings is resource intensive, requiring a lot of energy to provide them with needed water and light. Koliji realized that nature is no longer able to sustain itself in urban cities and became concerned about how this would affect the future of humanity.

“This is a time when we need to be in contact with nature the most,” said Koliji.

The drive to overcome these multifaceted problems led Koliji to found CREO. A resident of the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco, CREO devises solutions that use alternative growing to sustain plant life with minimal intervention. Since joining the Autodesk residency program in 2018, the CREO team has been working on developing smart, modular and autonomous green living systems for homes and buildings.

“Over 90 percent of the world’s population is breathing polluted air, which causes diseases like asthma and cancer,” said CREO’s Negar Kalantar, who also serves as codirector at California College of the Arts’ Digital Craft Lab.

To counter these adverse health effects, CREO has designed the AirIQ, a soil-less hydroponic system that employs a hybrid growth medium.

The AirIQ system is fully automated through a centralized control center that can measure nutrients, water level, pH level and other data. Air quality sensors and moving arms serve the dual purpose of providing necessary light to plants as well as scanning their growth.

Water runs through the entire system from a tank located at the bottom. A growing section made up of hybrid synthetic medium comprises three layers. The first layer optimizes irrigation and root structure, the second enables air filtration, and the third acts as a wick for water retention. All three layers combine to allow peak growth of the plants while being optimized for air purification. The root system, which serves as the air filtration element, has microorganisms that efficiently metabolize pollutants.

Initially, the AirIQ relied on hydroponics, a way of growing plants without soil. “But we soon realized that traditional hydroponics is not the solution,” Koliji explained.

Even though hydroponics results in 10 times less water usage than traditional field crop watering methods, it is still relatively resource intensive due to the centralized irrigation system—which causes all plants to receive the same fixed amount of nutrients, light and water, leading to monocultures. However, plants in nature are polyculture and require varying amounts of nutrients, light and water according to their needs.

Enter smart hydroponics. CREO’s BioBulb all-in-one hardware/software platform is built to mimic the polyculture nature of plants. It allows plants to grow in new environments with scarce resources through direct sensing, infusion and artificial intelligence (AI) to learn the optimum growth for a plant within its surroundings. The BioBulb comprises two components: hardware and software. CREO has invented its own AI software called Darwin, named after Charles Darwin.

“BioBulb is essentially a microchip combined with a micro-feeder installed in the plant root system,” explained Koliji. “Through the sensors, it understands the plant’s needs and acts as a plant precision feeder, providing the right amount of water and nutrients.”

The BioBulb hardware is essentially a smart planter consisting of three packs of sensors for monitoring the plant’s vitals. The unit directly infuses the plant with nutrients and water when needed. One pack of sensors is integrated into the growth medium—whether it is soil or a synthetic medium—where it monitors the temperature, pH level, humidity, electrical conductivity level and nutrients.

The second pack of sensors monitors the plant leaf surface from the top and observes light density and temperature, measuring the growth of the plant. The third pack of sensors measures ambient light, temperature and humidity.

“In addition, there is also a camera that visually detects the growth and coloration of the plant to determine if there is any disease,” expanded Koliji. “The Darwin system allows us to create an index of growth per plant in different contexts. It is as simple as running electricity cables and plugging in a light bulb. These hybrid connectors enable the transfer of nutrients, electricity and data. At the end, you connect BioBulb and the data basically optimizes the growth of the plant.”

The main difference between BioBulb and hydroponics technology is that the former provides much more precision.

Koliji elaborates further: “Hydroponics provide maximum yield in the minimum amount of time using a water tank, in addition to a fixed level of CO₂ and oxygen 24/7. This expends a lot of energy. With BioBulb, we are able to achieve control, create seasonality, and bring ornamental, medicinal and edible plants into the ecosystem.”

The “lack of green space and pollution is a problem in cities,” said Kalantar.

It takes approximately 30 years for a tree to fully mature, and the horizontal and vertical expansion of cities is further squeezing the available space for greenery and the natural growth of trees within built environments.

The AirQ by CREO aims to mitigate this issue. A self-sustaining ecological system, AirQ grows plants more efficiently than traditional landscaping by capturing rainwater and utilizing solar energy to power itself. An array of built-in sensors collects and logs environmental data. Bio-filtration technologies remove pollutants and purify the surrounding air, while plants serve as a carbon sink, using up CO₂ and releasing oxygen to improve air quality significantly. The AirQ also counters the urban heat island effect through the recirculation of air to provide a cooling effect.

The team conducted a study on the ecological performance of one AirQ and calculated it to be equivalent to 275 oak trees. “This is Landscape 2.0,” Koliji declared. “The AirQ strives to harvest maximum energy and resources from the environment in terms of humidity, water and sunlight.”

Buildings conventionally require several key layers of infrastructure such as electricity, sanitation systems and HVAC. CREO aims to redesign living spaces by introducing a network of BioBulbs, like an indoor farm or forest. In addition to the smarter use of natural resources, easy access to high quality food and greenery should benefit physical and psychological well-being.

The network of BioBulbs will be supplied by a BioServer, which can be installed under a sink like any other appliance that uses water. It can serve multiple interfaces, whether it is a complete green wall or an edible wall. The whole system is scalable and can easily be integrated with simple modular parts—similar to sanitary and electrical installations. The BioServer is also fully autonomous and centrally controlled, foregoing the need for water tanks. The absence of tanks reduces the need for maintenance after installation, as they need to be cleaned regularly.

The BioBulb growing units are designed to fit within the interior design of a living space and can be connected to the BioServer using BioPlugs.

“Our BioServer provides a precision dose, like a color printer that prints nutrients into a stream of water and sends it to the target destination of plants,” explained Koliji. “It is not a doser or pump as is the case in existing hydroponics, but actually uses technology similar to inkjet printing.”

The AirQ’s proposed launch project, named the “Unchimney,” is another application of the technology. The idea is to use BioBulb technology to repurpose and greenify underutilized urban areas, such as the smoke stacks of an unused factory. This not only brings landscape to cities but also beautifies the area and purifies air.

The CREO team first built the AirIQ during its full-time residency at the Autodesk Technology Center using the wood shop and automated machining tools in the company’s CNC shop. The AirQ and its arms were 3D printed, with polylactic acid (PLA) used to create the modules. PLA, which is one of the most popular thermoplastics used in desktop 3D printing, is sourced from renewables such as corn starch, tapioca roots or sugar cane, unlike other industrial materials derived from petroleum.

For the first prototype of the BioBulb, mockups were cut from plexiglass using laser cutters. Once the design was finalized, circuit boards were obtained off the shelf, while the shell and hardware were 3D printed at the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco. However, due to the COVID-19 restrictions in the U.S., the team had to relocate its operations to Turkey, where they have been using Makerbots.

In the future, the team plans to use injection molding to manufacture the BioBulb’s shell with recyclable hemp plastic as the raw material.

“Hemp is one of the hardest materials naturally found in nature, but also absorbs a lot of CO₂,” explained Koliji. “This makes it very sustainable to use.”

CREO intends to build the technology so that it is accessible and does not have to be replaced or maintained frequently. Team engineers estimate that the BioBulb hard shell will have a lifetime of at least 20 years.

“In terms of the electronics, there is a standard estimation of five years in operation followed by maintenance,” added Koliji.

The team is working on miniaturizing the technology in mass production, with the goal of reducing both its scale and price. Maintenance could be as easy as removing a microchip from the bottom of the plant and inserting a new one in its place every five years as per the maintenance plan, with the microchip costing less than 40 cents.

Another advantage to the system is that Darwin collects 40 cross-reference points, in contrast to existing pH codes that require reconfiguration every few minutes. The multiplicity of data points allows the BioBulb to operate almost independently through machine learning, as it will be able to detect errors and automatically correct itself in terms of the accuracy of capturing data and feeding the plants. Consequently, loss of energy and water is reduced drastically, further lowering operational costs.

“CREO makes it possible for nature to grow anywhere,” Koliji expressed. “Think of buildings that have an integrated green living infrastructure as a system.”

The initial plan is to work with home, building and kitchen remodeling companies. CREO estimates that the kitchen and bath remodeling market in the U.S. is worth $180 billion, while the home improvement market is valued at $560 billion.

Once it establishes a vertical market with BioBulb, CREO aims to fully launch in 2024 and create a horizontal market by integrating with buildings and smart home appliances such as Google Nest and Samsung. It will also target partnerships with real estate developers and modular home companies to expand its market, which is extrapolated to be worth $1.1 trillion.

Koliji describes his dream: “These technologies can really help communities in the future, when mass adoption with very low prices is available to all, especially when future health and climate crises hit. We are looking at bringing our initial costs so low in the first four years that middle- to low-income people can adopt it on a large scale.”

CREO’s technology is promising, but its growth has faced several obstacles. While the startup has been able to assemble some modules of the AirQ, plans for going full scale have had to be put on hold due to social distancing protocols. Additionally, the supply chain for hemp plastic raw material has been disrupted due to the pandemic, restricting access to relevant markets and technologies.

There are underutilized properties in San Francisco that CREO is looking to convert into vertical gardens. Talks are underway with owners and city authorities; however, funding has been an issue.

“The projects require a sort of private-public partnership,” said Koliji. “As a small startup company, we are fundraising for our solutions, but we don’t have the bandwidth to do that without external support.”

Hopefully, CREO will be able to resolve these issues and help make our living spaces greener and healthier places to inhabit.