In Collaboration with Ihun Han & Aryan Gupta
Ch!rp
This project is a proposal for an entomology-driven food biosystem, featuring a working cricket farm and a café that introduces insect-based foods through familiar offerings, such as pasta, croissants, and coffee made with cricket flour.
Designed using research into house cricket behavior and life cycles, the modular apparatus farm supports scalable production while transforming waste through a biodigester that generates renewable energy. Crickets are processed into both high-protein flour and chitin for bioplastic, which is used in café wares and visitor workshops.
Features
Skills
Prototyping, Sketching, 3D printing, CAD, Project Management, Systems Thinking, Systems Mapping
Each diamond demonstrates a modular pod housing crickets and collecting cricket frass. All pods are connected to a biodigester, where the frass is converted into electricity to power the system.
Model
System Diagram
This includes a general systems diagram and a detailed diagram calculating daily production logistics of the farm.
This diagram visualizes the interconnected inputs and outputs of the system, highlighting the circular economy principles embedded in the apparatus.
System interactions
Sketches
Brainstorm
Research
Through comparative research on edible insects, we identified crickets as the most viable species due to their high protein yield, rapid growth, and existing cultural adoption in the U.S. We complemented this with research into industrial cricket farming, focusing on scalable management systems and the crickets’ quality of life.
System Diagram Proposals
