Landscape Fabric Roll Up
Problem statement
Picture yourself volunteering your precious time after a long day of work and having to strenuously roll up long rolls of landscape fabric with your hands. Volunteers at Forward Garden, who generally include retired citizens with limited mobility, generously give their limited time out of the kindness of their hearts to provide food for the Madison Area Food Pantry, so the act of volunteering should be as easy and efficient as possible for them. The process as it is done now is that one person crouches down to roll up the fabric while two or three other volunteers sweep dirt off and make sure the wind doesn’t tangle up the fabric. This can be very frustrating for the volunteers and feel like an inefficient use of time. One solution to a similar problem is the EasyRoll Fabric Winder, a stationary, manual machine that uses a crank to easily roll up thin fabric onto a spool [1]. Due to the landscape fabric having lengths up to 200 feet and the machine not being designed for thicker landscape fabric, the winder doesn’t neatly solve the problem at the garden. We strive to provide a solution to the volunteers at Forward Garden that preaches efficiency, usability, and durability that could be used by other small-scale gardens in the future. Essentially, our goal is to provide the volunteers with a device that can not only be operated by one volunteer at a time but can roll up the fabric promptly without a demanding amount of effort. [1] (2022, Jan. 8). EasyRoll The 100% Manually Operated Fabric Winder Machine. [Online]. Available: https://www.marim-service.it/portfolio-item/easy-roll/?lang=en.
Team members 
Tommy Davis – facilitator
Zane Mukhtiar – communicator
Tyler Gibson – accountant
Tyler Gibson – admin
Client
Lisa Stec
Forward Gardens