Design

Design Tools

Design is the second stage of a project. It turns what research found into drawings, plant guilds, buildings and component lists — all of it reading the findings you already have.

1. How Design is unlocked

Design is unlocked per project, once, and it stays unlocked for that project. It is not a subscription and it is not a role you are given: another project of yours can still be locked while this one is open.

Two steps, one payment

Step one is a free, one-time confirmation that you want to work as a designer. You do it once for your account and never again.

Step two is the per-project activation. Which price applies is decided by the scale you chose for the project, not by you: the garden scales — urban, terrace, homestead, market and community gardens — activate for €75 and include 900 AI research credits. Every other scale is an ecological project and activates for €200, including 1,500 credits.

Where you do it

The unlock page is My Projects, and it walks you through both steps in order. You get there in three ways:

The Unlock Design button on a locked design node in your Project Map.
The design panel at the bottom of the Research Hub, or on your Farm home page.
Opening any design page for a locked project — you are redirected to the unlock page rather than turned away.

Once a project is unlocked, its Design Hub opens: the index of every design tool for that project. Before it is unlocked, the Design Hub is behind the same gate as everything else, so it is not where you buy — it is what you buy.

Credits, unlocks and subscriptions

2. The site design canvas

The canvas is where the project stops being text. You draw your site on a map, then work on top of that drawing.

Design on the map

Trace your boundary, buildings, water and access on a satellite base map. Everything downstream measures against this geometry, so it is worth drawing carefully once.

Zones and sectors

Mark permaculture zones by how often you visit them, and sectors for the sun, wind, water and noise that cross the site. A sector analysis agent will read what you drew and report on it.

Once zones are drawn, the Zone Components tool works one zone at a time: it proposes the plants, animals, structures and technologies that belong in that zone given its conditions, and you accept or reject each one. That is where a component list for the site actually comes from.

3. The Plant Guild Designer

A guild is a group of plants that work as one system — a canopy, the layers under it, nitrogen fixers, ground cover, and something to attract the insects the rest need. Designing one by hand means holding a lot of relationships in your head at once.

The Guild Designer does it as a pipeline. You start from the flora you selected for the project; a companion suggester helps you round out the plant set. From there the agents run in order: filter the candidates, read the site context, map each plant to the role it plays, arrange the vertical layers, optimise for synergy, then for space, then for timing across the season, and finally compose the guild and draw it.

Nothing is applied to your project until you approve the composed guild. Rejecting one sends the pipeline back rather than losing the work.

4. Passive-solar floor plans

If your project includes a building, this is the longest chain of tools in the app, and it runs in two halves.

The solar assessment

Eight agents assess the building against your site: solar conditions, orientation and layout, glazing and windows, thermal mass, shading and solar control, envelope and ventilation, heating and cooling, and an integration report that reconciles them. The output is a set of constraints, in metric units, not a picture.

The plan itself

A wizard then asks what the building is for — rooms, sizes, adjacencies, how many floors. Your answers are merged with the solar constraints under a fixed priority order, in which hard solar requirements outrank your stylistic preferences, and the plan is generated from the merged set. You review it, reject it with feedback, and regenerate — up to five attempts per plan. Plans are named in sequence and kept, so you can compare them.

The geometry is not written by an AI

An AI decides which rooms neighbour which. The actual walls and dimensions are computed geometrically and then checked — overlaps, access, minimum sizes — because spatial arithmetic is exactly what language models get wrong.

5. Building visualisation

Once a plan is accepted, the visualiser renders the building from it — a picture you can put in front of someone who does not read floor plans. There is a garden visualiser on the same principle for the planted parts of the site. Both are generated images: they show the intent, not a survey.

The whole site — zones, placed components, buildings and terrain — is rendered by the Visualizer, a page of its own in the Design menu. How the Visualizer works.

6. What else is in the Design stage

Element selection

Flora, fauna, structures, technologies and soils, each proposed for your site and then reviewed for suitability before they enter your component list.

How the suggestions are made

Seasonal garden planner

Turns the planted parts of the design into a year: what goes in when, and what follows it.

Practice transition

For land already in production — assesses moving it to sustainable practice, with risks, sequence and a feasibility report.

Sharing your design

Publish the finished design so you can show it to a client, a neighbour or a planning office.

7. Working through it

Design reads research

Every design tool takes its inputs from the findings the research stage produced. Starting the guild pipeline with no flora selected, or the floor plan with no solar assessment, produces an answer built on defaults. The Project Map keeps a step greyed out until its inputs exist, and tells you which one is missing.

Work from the Project Map when you are not sure what is next, and from the Design Hub when you know which tool you want.

EcoDesign