Project Title
The title of my final project is “Your Pet Plant”
Project Statement of Purpose
Environmental issues such as climate change, pollution and sustainability have often been considered as the most significant issues in the 21th century since they are tightly connected with human beings’ fate in the future. However, one of the obstacles for addressing these environmental issues is that the public are not aware of how urgent and severe the situation is. The “Yellow Vest Movement”, along with other protests against “environmental taxation” around globe, and the America’s shocking and surprising withdrawal of the “Paris Agreement” intended for global corporation in addressing climate change. All of these political and social events happened in the last decade keep dividing our collectivity and reminding me of the lack of the awareness and consensus. Moreover, as one of the most important element of addressing environmental issues, plants are continuously ignored. When asking for the potential solutions, people mainly focus on strategies like limitation of carbon emission or innovation of new energy, while forget that plants play an important role in maintaining the stability of the climate and purification of the pollution. From my research, I learned that the ignorance of plants derived from their subjectivity. Unlike animals, plants aren’t able to engage in a direct interaction with humans with verbal, facial, body signals. Thus, the emotional attaches between us are limited by this insufficiency of language. For this reason, I would like to create this kind of “Pet Plant” to externalize and visualize the interactions between human and plants in order to stimulate and deepen people’s recognition of plants as a living entity, which may eventually raise public awareness of environmental issues.
Project Plan
The major structure of my project would be an instant imitation. I will create a visual image of a plant with processing, users can interact with the plant in the processing by pointing the mouse on different parts of the plants and see different animations the plant will present as reactions for expressing its emotion and thoughts. Meanwhile, I want to build a physical model with Arduino so that every instruction of the user can be transform into the physical world instantly. I think through this interaction and imitation from virtual world to physical world, the user are more likely to build on a close relationship and emotional connections with those “plants” since they can feel the real existence of them. My plan is to firstly finish writing the code in processing by the end of next week (week 12). Then I would try to build the physical model and connect the physical with the virtual plant in week 13 by recitation. For week 14 when we are supposed to finish out final project, I am planning to do some user tests in order to identify the shortcomings of my project and seek improvement.
Context and Significance
The idea of my final project originated from a project I’ve accidentally encountered on “Creative Applications Network”. The project is called “Pour Reception”. The designers of this project use water as a “digital interface” to control the radio. Different behaviors with regard to the two bottles and the water within represent different instructions. For instance, pouring water from one bottle to the other is the to switch stations and putting your fingers into the water is to pause. This project is really striking to me since it is artistically appealing. Technically, this innovative interface is not practical since the interaction may be a little bit complicated but for me it is really artistic and elegant, which help slow down the frequency of life and strengthen the relationship between humans and items. According to my preparatory research and analysis, one important feature I added on to my definition of interaction is that the interactive project should be motivational and appealing to the audience. In the previous project I research, the aesthetic value of its interaction is the appealing point. This project gave me the inspiration that the interactions we create must get in touch with our inner state and provide us with high-level, psychological and valuable satisfaction that they can be truly motivational. Thus, for my final project, I would like to anthropomorphize and externalize the interaction between human and plants in attempt to help build initial emotional attachments. However, I think my plan still have lots of space for improvement. Initially, I want to design a mutual interaction, which suggests that you can not only implement the instructions from the Processing to the Arduino, but you can also reversely interact with the physical model to change the visual representations in the Processing. Concerning the explicit hardness, I would make this idea as a backup if I can finish my plan beyond the schedule. I think this project has a bright prospect if we can design a wireless control system so that people can interact with plants that are far away from them with their electronic devices.