Design studio: Intervention 02 > Pulse

Team members: Nicolò Baldi, Everardo Castro, Oliver Lloyd, Jorge Muñoz Marius Schairer and Albert Vila Bonfill

Introduction

Plants and fungi are living beings that apparently do not behave in the same way as animals. We know that they grow and change their appearance, but at such a slow speed that they look like inanimate objects. This apparent lack of movement means that most of the time we are not aware that we are surrounded by living beings that breathe, feed and communicate with each other and with the environment.

This intervention aims to magnify these signs of life and communication to make it more apparent that they are living beings like us.

The process

Assembly tutorial

Presentation video

Reflections

I think that on a collective level, we have all learned a lot from this project. We have not started with a very predefined idea. The project has been shaping and branching as we encountered successes and difficulties. Thanks to the electronics and programming skills of some of the group members, we have managed to capture electrical signals that seem to respond to external stimuli, above all, to the contact and movement produced on the plants. We have also been able to amplify these signals and transport them to digital twins of the plants, which is very spectacular and has been very popular at the Design Dialogs.

However, we must be honest in saying that we do not understand too much what these signals respond to or how to capture them without inducing them. We also experimented with chemical signals thanks to a Smart Citizen kit lent by the Fablab, but we realized that we needed other sensors and a more accurate experimental design to draw more reliable conclusions. If we continue to experiment, we will need other sensors, we will also need to work with cloned plants and use control plants to obtain comparable results.

This process of learning by trial and error is one of the most interesting points of the intervention; the other has been the combination of skills, respect, and camaraderie among the team members, despite the fact that we were not clear where we were going or how far we would go. I have to confess that there has been a lot of commitment, and I have learned a lot from my teammates.