This work focused on the systematic manipulation of plants for affective user feedback. Building on centuries of explicit plant manipulation and recent work in HCI, we explored the combination of personal informatics and plant-mediated feedback.
We argued that plant-based information displays could offer affective, multi-sensorial and sometimes ambiguous signs for users.
In the paper below, we described our plant manipulation system and report the results of 4 experiments in this novel design space. The images to the left display traditional graphs of a person’s daily step count and the equivalent information displayed using a plant’s health.
We also provided guidelines and suggestions for how designers can incorporate plant-based information displays into their work and conclude by exploring specific domains where plant-based displays could be effective as information displays for personal behavior, harnessing their acceptaed use in everyday settings and affective affordances.
More broadly, there is considerable potential for the use of plants and other botanical organisms to serve as living information displays, not only narrowly for personal feedback on individual behaviour, but also for applications where they may serve as information related to an environment (e.g., is the air clean).
Articles
Chien, J. T., Guimbretière, F. V., Rahman, T., Gay, G., & Matthews, M. (2015, April). Biogotchi! An exploration of plant-based information displays. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1139-1144).