What if plants inside the house
could replace some of the artificial devices?
A plant absorbing water
acts as a natural motor;
their photosynthesis is optoelectronics;
their growth is the 3D printer,
and so on.
And that’s what I envision the world to be,
where we are designing with the plant biology world
to get to the electronics that can self-repair,
self-power,
and self-fabricate with the plants themselves.
My name is Harpreet Sareen
and I’m an assistant professor of Interaction and Media Design
at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Cyborg Botany is a concept that I came up with
which is at the intersection of botany
and computer science or electronics.
Right now, all of the fabrication that we do is silicon-based.
Everything that we develop is artificial.
We design with silicon,
we end up creating a lot of e-waste.
We use a lot of materials from the Earth.
We wouldn’t have to do that
if all of these materials were organic.
I envision a layer of digital electronics inside the plants
where are functions that we do with the computers
which start to get merged with the botanical world itself.
All plants have electronic signals inside them.
These are bioelectrochemical signals.
And these signals happen on change of light,
on change of gravity,
on change of various changes in their environment,
like soil conditions, etc.
Elowan was reading one such change in the plant,
which was a change in light in two opposite directions.
Inside Elowan we were listening,
and now we are actually sending the signals to the plants.
So the latest projects, Phytoactuators and Planta Digitalis,
are exactly that.
They take an opposite approach
to listening to these signals
but instead send signals to them.
We ask the questions
“What if plants in our house could replace some of our artificial devices?
What if interaction with plants extends as far as
talking to our digital devices?"
The movie 'Avatar' showed plants on an alien planet
doing all these amazing activities.
However, looking closer from a biologist’s point of view,
really what the movie did was exposed the fiction
hidden inside the plants
and bring the unknown to the foreground.
The more we understand nature,
the better we become in our artificial matters.
Changing our thought process from completely artificial fabrication
to a hybridization
can lead us to an active forefront
of designing with nature.
So we take a Venus Flytrap,
normally we observe that Venus Flytrap closes when,
you know, a fly sits inside the plant.
In this case, what we do is
we connected it with silver electrodes
which are at the mid-rib and mid-leaf of the plant
and we send those signals to the plant itself.
We also developed a software
on which we can click at particular points and
that sends particular stimulation signals to the plants
and that closes the leaves of the plants.
So essentially what we end up doing is
instead of listening to the plants
we are now able to send the signals to the plants
and that ends up controlling the plants,
like opening and closing, etc.
or actuation of leaves.
The fundamental ethos:
we should not harm the plant,
we should not harm the nature
and the plants around it.
And the third is
the electronics that we are designing
should be biodegradable
and shouldn’t harm the environment overall
after the death of the plant.
Indicating weather conditions before stepping outside the house;
telepresence if your partner is at home or not;
responding to your partner’s touch through corresponding actuation;
indicating foreign toxicity elements in your home or water or soil;
plants in office doing the soft notification if you have a new delivery;
all of these are very small notifications
that could be triggered through
a small actuation in the plant itself
and replacing some of these artificial devices that we have.
I have a few other use cases in mind.
Gestural computing usually entails external devices
whether it’d be in our kitchens, office rooms or desks.
However,
if the plants with embedded antennas were pervasive
and had digital connections as we show here,
our devices could literally take the form of a living plant.
For example, waving before leaving the kitchen,
or a room to turn the lights on and off.
Keeping track of the number of people
exiting or entering at a residential building.
Plants counting at parking entrances to see
if the parking is full or finding particular empty spots
with the plant near each spot
or keeping track of wildlife in a forest –
that’s possible with this technology as well.
Monitoring plants in home or field.
When I say monitoring,
that means plants that monitor different things
inside a home or a field,
that are also able to relay
that monitoring information
about their own physiology
using this technology.
So these are some of the direct use cases that
we envision with these projects.