Renato Waru
Authored Book · Illustration · Case Study

A book about integrated systems, made by integrating every discipline of its craft into a single practice.

Introdução à Aquaponia. Research, prototyping, illustration, infographics, writing, and print, authored end to end for a subject I first had to build to understand.

Introdução à Aquaponia, the authored book, shown as a printed object
Year
2017
Type
Authored book, 160 pages
Role
Concept to print
Funding
Crowdfunded

About the Project

This book began as a personal problem. I wanted to grow food at Waru, my property in the countryside, so I taught myself aquaponics from scratch and built a working system by hand.

When I partnered with Claudio, who built these systems professionally, we saw the same gap: nothing solid existed in Portuguese except dry technical handbooks no one wanted to read. My job was to fix that. Drawing on my editorial years, including time at Superinteressante, Brazil's leading popular-science magazine, I turned biology, chemistry, and plumbing into something with rhythm, color, and narrative.

I owned the entire project, from research, prototyping, and illustration to writing, layout, and the crowdfunding that funded it. It is the clearest proof I have that one designer can take a complex subject from raw curiosity to a finished, authoritative object.

The Book

The open book held in two hands, showing the anatomy of the bell siphon across a purple illustrated page and a text page Open spread from the book explaining the cycling process that starts an aquaponic system

Range of Visual Thinking

Large isometric illustration of a complete aquaponic system, with fish tank, grow beds, pump and pipework drawn in three dimensions
The core system, mapped like a body: heart, lungs, arteries.
Diagram of the nitrogen cycle in aquaponics, tracing ammonia through bacteria into nitrate taken up by plants
How nitrogen moves through the system, from waste to nutrient.
Landscape scale illustration of the same nutrient cycle, drawn across fish, water, plants and soil
The same cycle, at landscape scale.
Comparison of aquaponic layout options, showing different arrangements of tanks and grow beds
Layout options for different growing strategies.
Build guide for a minimum working system, with annotated plumbing parts, measurements and bell siphon assembly
The smallest system that works, drawn part by part with real measurements.

Co-authored with Claudio Alfaro (technical lead). Pedagogical section co-authored with Maga Miranda.