Plants are the best. They’re pretty, they clean the air, they’re good listeners, and they don’t eat your furniture. On the downside, they need regular care, and they’re lousy communicators. Designers Huy Bui, Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena, and Jon Schramm have created a system to make your relationship with them easier. Their system, called Plant-In City, proposes to house your greenery in elegant structures that wrap them in a field of sensors to help you monitor their health.
Plant-In City is a modular series of frames that can be combined to create a customized plant habitat. There are three basic frame types—soil, water, and light—to suit your specific variety of shrub. Each type comes in a variety of sizes, meaning your habitat can range from a single box to a stackable riot of greenery. To this basic infrastructure, Plant-In City adds a variety of Arduino-powered sensors to monitor the plants and their environment. This in turn connects to the web, allowing you to care for your plants from the office or from a remote Caribbean island.
“It started from a simple idea: Can we water our plants remotely with our iPhones while traveling or off site?” de Llarena says. He had been desperately yearning for greenery, but worried that his busy travel schedule would doom his houseplants’ survival. “We live in a ‘there’s an app for that’ age, so we wanted to explore how we can use technology to improve our relationship with plants.”
But as the team dove deeper into the design, their vision grew. “The simple goal was keeping our plants healthy, and then we found ourselves connected to a larger global issue of sustainability and topics like water and its place in a modern city,” says Bui. Installing sensors to monitor the air quality gave them information about their own environment as well as the plants’. Being able to more finely tune the irrigation schedule resulted in water conservation.
Even as budding horticulturalists, de Llarena admits there was a period of learning as they developed the project. They struggled to find the right balance between accurate monitoring and overly intrusive sensors. Their goal was to find ways of letting the plants ‘speak.’
They’ve fostered better communication by beaming the levels of light, humidity, moisture and temperature to the Internet, which will be accessible via Plant-In's website or through mobile apps. Each entry point will include charts and graphs about the state of the sprouts as well as controls for adjusting the plant’s water or light on the fly.
The modular box system is key to creating a pleasing space. “It is about proportions,” says Schramm. The frames are built in incremental steps—one foot, two feet, four feet. This allows a great deal of freedom in how individual frames are stacked, because they will always fit together. “We have installed this project in several locations and the enjoyable part of each installation is figuring out the configuration and playing with the design.”
Despite the geometric regularity of the right-angled frames, the construction as a whole has a natural feel. “We see cantilevering naturally occurring in rocks and cliffs, and this suspension is full of tension,” says Bui. “We wanted to recreate this with subtle shifts in the box forms.”
“We see these designs as a potential ‘Internet of plants’ where global communities share and are connected by a network of plant cities,” says de Llarena. “We are like aliens in our own home: we evolved from the earth like any other organism but we are intent in controlling it.”
We love this project because it’s an example of really elegant mass customization; it marries the physical, digital, and natural worlds, making it feel like you could have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in your living room. We'll sign up for that!