SummerFAB Greenhouse
Community Research and Furniture Design
Industrial Design Faculty Member
Four week project
SummerFAB Pre-College Program 2025
Wentworth Institute of Technology
SummerFAB partnered with Sociedad Latina, which operates in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.
As an architecture and design program, we built them a greenhouse and modular furniture for plant storage and summer gatherings.
1. Community Research
I introduced the high school students to community research. I organized the students into four groups, each directed by a TA who served as a facilitator to develop questions for the community. To ensure there was minimal overlap between the different groups’ questions, I designated question categories:
- About the location
- About the people
- Actions taking place
- How people feel in the space
- How they’d like to represent themselves
The SummerFAB team visited the community garden. We gathered with Sociedad Latina’s leadership and youth volunteers to ask our questions.
Synthesizing as a Group
We all reconvened in the studio and the groups wrote pieces of evidence on different pages. They organized the pages on the wall, and I facilitated a group discussion.
We typed up each piece of evidence into a document and uploaded it to ChatGPT. I provided context about our program’s mission and prompted it to synthesize our findings, identify our human biases, and self-acknowledge its biases as an AI.
Points Discussed with the Students
- False Statements: ChatGPT stated that the garden is “currently maintained mostly by elderly Latinx women,” which we did not mention in our collection of evidence.
- In-Person Nuances: ChatGPT acknowledged that it “cannot access nuances of tone, body language, or unspoken dynamics,” which caused us to consider human-to-human dynamics as critical evidence of our ethnographic research.
The AI bias-checking exercise demonstrated that both human researchers and AI introduce biases into ethnographic research. However, we can use AI to synthesize findings while maintaining a critical mindset about its limitations.
2. Furniture Design
My second leadership role involved designing the furniture that accompanied the greenhouse.
I drew initial furniture designs that we could fabricate with our 3/4″ 4’x8′ plywood sheets.
I CAD modeled the furniture in SolidWorks and exported its drawings into Rhino. I laser-cut scale models in 1/8 scale while teaching the students how to use the laser cutter.
I edited the furniture designs into fewer pieces to make assembly and disassembly easier.
All of the furniture was cut with a CNC, sanded, stained, and finished.
We made 2 tables, 6 benches, and 12 foldable stools.
Project Management
When plans were expected to change, we met consistently and strategically.
We organized the info into easy-to-find locations in Google Drive and printed it for the wall.
Consistency and Effort
Jigs were implemented to assist the students in the tasks: cutting, drilling, and gluing.
The furniture accompanied the greenhouse we built.
We reverse engineered the renowned Tallon stool!
Special thanks to Samuel Maddox (Architecture faculty), Andreas Armenis, Loretta Stephens-Smith (Pre-College), Daryush Dehnavi (Lab Tech), Ramadani Abdul-Aziz, Olivia Sylva, Mayeline Merchan Nocove, Angela Alvarez (Teaching Assistants), and Sociedad Latina for their contributions, all of whom were instrumental to the success of this project.
Karina Bhattacharya 