Designing playful systems of care, community, and co-growth
Garden Girls is a collaborative design collective project that explores gardening as a radical tool for connection, grounding, and social transformation. Rooted in participatory values, it comprises two interlinked interventions: Chive City, a board game simulating the joy and labor of urban farming, and the Steuben Community Garden, a social activation that transformed a hallway into a shared green space.
Developed by an international, all-women design collective team, the project emerged from a desire to slow down, reconnect with food systems, and reimagine community through nature. At its core, Garden Girls is about growing together, across soil, stories, and shared spaces.
Whether through planting a seed in a hallway or strategizing over a gardening-themed game board, the project invites participants to rethink care not just as a value, but as a design method.
Role: Visual Designer, Illustrator, Researcher, Game Designer
Tools: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Procreate
Instructed by Asad Pervaiz
Project 1
Chive city
- Urban life offers few chances to engage with agriculture
- Access to nature is rapidly diminishing for city dwellers
- This game reconnects players with farming through interactive play
- It highlights the effort behind food production and promotes appreciation for it
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Welcome to Chive City, one of earth’s most renowned biophilic urban landscapes! Here in the foliage-speckled concrete jungle, and worldwide, rapid urbanization and commercialization of farmlands have led to scarcity of green space, and fresh resources are few and far between. Citizens of the city have turned to community gardens to grow and harvest the food they eat every day.
You, a resident of Chive City, must work with your neighbors to successfully build and maintain a community garden, collaborating to harvest crops and sustain a food source while coexisting with the urban environment.
But it won't be easy; natural disasters, disease, tariffs, and other crises threaten the food sources of Chive City. You will have to protect your plot and help your neighbors to survive, because without collectivism, the garden will not flourish!
Your grow kit consists of the following components:
- Community Garden: the game board
- Spinner: to guide each turn
- Wheelbarrow: passed clockwise each turn
- Garden Guardian Cards: individual character cards
- Crop Cards: stackable game cards that fit together with the garden base
- Roots; base card
- Stems; middle card 1
- Leaves; middle card 2
- Buds; middle card 3
- Fruits; top card
- Chance Cards
- Bonus Cards: game cards that boost a player’s green thumb
- Setback Cards: game cards that hinder a player’s ability to grow
- Tokens: to count your points
- Point Tokens (1 point): gained whenever a player plants a crop
- Flower Tokens (3 points): gained when a player completes a full plant
- Egg Tokens (5 points); specialty token gained through card scenario
- Charles the Chicken (10 points): protects players from certain setbacks
- Farm Basket: to collect points
Final outcome
Project 2
Steuben Community Garden
About the Garden
- Steuben Hall Community Garden is a social activation project.
- It is collaboratively cultivated by the students who live and work in Steuben Hall every day.
- Our garden is not just a vibrant green space where plants are growing it's a touching point that connects people with each other and with the environment.
Our Pratt community is losing engagement with the studio environment and the people around it.
Let’s bring people’s attention back to the present moment, to the people around them, and to the ecosystem they are part of. Let’s use community garden as a tool to connect and ground people.
Will our participants be able to successfully grow things within the Steuben Hall environment?
What tools and guidance will they need from us?
Final Outcome
31 gardeners
15 messages
- Sustainable solutions exist within our communities
- Community can be fostered through nature
- Community members want to participate in activities