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Posts Tagged ‘studium’

My Biosensing with Plants chapter is published in the book: The Green Thread Dialogues with the Vegetal World

December 10th, 2015 No comments

Some findings of my master thesis about biosensing are published in the new book:

The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World

Book about Plants

Edited by Patrícia Vieira; Monica Gagliano and John Ryan

Together with Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, we wrote the chapter 13 The Art of Human to Plant Interaction. If you want to see videos of these featured Human Plant Interaction, please check: Biosensing for Human Computer Interactions

Please feel free to post your Feedback about our chapter!

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Plants as a barometer: “Charisma Garden”

October 20th, 2014 10 comments

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The last introduced projects were characterized by its approach of attaching data to a plant. In this project “Charisma Garden” (2013 - 2014), the data will be directly integrated in the health and growth process of a plant. In comparison to the “Travelling Plants” and “Dead Tree Project”, the data is not added to the plant then rather the representation of the data is the plant by itself in this project. In relation to the chapter “3.1. Visualizing techniques with plants” on page 44, the “Charisma Garden” project can be assigned to the category plant displays and takes over the role as a data sculpture. This dynamic (visually changing) data sculpture presents the social activity of a Facebook user.

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Plants in urban environments: “Dead Tree Drops”

September 29th, 2014 21 comments

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The previous project “Travelling plants” explored the possibilities of connecting digital communication technology with plants. People’s reaction emerged like expected, but the involvement of digital communication technology provides still some space for further experiments. Therefore, the new experiment named “Dead Tree Drop” connects and stores location-based digital data directly on a plant within an urban natural environment. In the course of this thesis the strong relationship between plant-based artwork and its environment were described before. For this reason plants can be associated with local characteristics. Moreover, humans like to stay and rest in natural environments, where they often like to read books and magazines. These initial conditions inspired me to create a physical interface for local-based digital information within natural urban environments.

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Public Intervention with plants: “Travelling Plants”

September 29th, 2014 5 comments

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The previous chapter described the artwork “Season Patterns”, which captured natural environmental changes. The interactive relationship only existed between the artist and his surrounding natural environment. In contrast to that, the collaboration project “Travelling Plants” with Juliane Springsguth created a direct interactive relationship between plants and humans as well as between humans and humans.

The interaction between humans and plants intended to improve the human well-being. This improvement was applied in an urban context, where the daily life is characterized by stress and appointments [Shoemaker2002, page 140]. Public transport as a public space is a location where people have the time to rest, although the environment does not provide a relaxing friendly atmosphere. Under these circumstances, a setting with plants has the ability to transform a stressful mood to a relaxing state of mind more easily [Shoemaker2002, pp. 181]. The famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted assigned plants a healing power for the human mind [Flagler1994, page 232]. Read more...

Practical component: Methodology

August 8th, 2014 9 comments

After exploring and describing the theoretical botany knowledge for Human Plant Interfaces in chapter 2, the chapter 3 has investigated contemporary Human Plant Interfaces in interactive art, media art and human computer interaction. This section explores new applications for interacting with or through plants in urban or interior environments. The methodology of the practical works is based on the research outcomes of chapter 2 and 3.
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Research objectives and methodology

May 18th, 2014 No comments

The goal of this research is to present the advantages and disadvantages of Human Plant Interfaces. Moreover, this thesis explores the interdisciplinary commonalities of botany, art and interface design. The qualitative analysis approach in this thesis reveals elementary functions and technical implementations of Human Plant Interfaces. The results are categorized by these functions and applications in five different chapters. The first chapter describes visualizing techniques with plants, which can be associated with an actuator or feedback channel in an interactive system. The chapter about biosensing presents different implementation techniques for utilizing plants as a sensor (input channel) for interactive applications. The functionality of these bio sensors are compared to the common electronic sensor measurements of pressure, light, proximity, acoustic, tilt, motion, and orientation. The following chapters 3.3 and chapter 3.4 investigate Human Plant Interface applications in the domain of environmental and social design. All sections in chapter 3 explore the integration of technology in nature driven environments.

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Categories: english, Plants Tags: ,

Book review: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

March 29th, 2013 2 comments

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In relation of my masterthesis and my interests in location-based mobile apps I read the book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" by William H. Whyte. The book is quite old and the first edition was published around 1980. My research focus was in particular in exploring how people behave in urban environments WITHOUT mobile communication technology. I am digital native, so I have no real idea how the world was before mobiles, walkmans and Game Boys. The book delivers a really good insight how people meet and behave in small urban places (plazas and small parks). Furthermore, it describes the vital elements of these plazas. How they correlate to each other  and how to design them. The target groups of this book are more or less architects, city planners and landscape architects. But even for urban activists and street artists the book has some value. The elements of small urban spaces haven't changed much since 1980. Almost each element has his own chapter:
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Subdisciplines of botany in context of Interface Design

March 11th, 2013 No comments

In my previous post I presented a text collage about the basics of botany. In this blog post I created again a text collage about the subdisciplines of botany for Interface Designer. In my opinion there only four really interesting subdisciplines: Plant perception, plant defense against herbivory, Ethnobotany, and Horticulture. Each subdiscipline has a short description (text collage from wikipedia) what it does and a comment of mine. In the comment I give an argument why I think this topic is important for a deeper research. So here it goes:

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Masterthesis: Human Plant Interfaces

February 15th, 2013 No comments

Masterthesis Starter

Since October I am working on my masterthesis about Human Plant Interfaces. I chose this topic because plants are not well researched in an interface design context. Plants are vital for our life but they are very rare in urban environments. In the context of my thesis I will research plants under the point of view of an interface designer. My objective is to find ways for integrating plants more in our daily life. The results of the research will be shared on my blog. I am happy about every feedback and open minded for discussions. At the university I showed a small presentation of my topic, it will give you an idea what I am planning to do.

*** UPDATE: Download the masterthesis here ***

“TAKE ME PLACES” artwork is aborted

February 7th, 2012 2 comments

Last year at september Me and Andrea Suter started a location-based experiment with the name Take me Places. Our basic idea was:

TAKE ME PLACES is an art project, which plays with the notions of territory and dislocation, orientation and the loss of such. TAKE ME PLACES will travel around the world until July 2012. At the end of its travels the photographs as well as the added artefacts will be exhibited. TAKE ME PLACES plays with public spaces, is participatory, involves a random the public, is dependent upon it.

We decided to place two suitcases in public spaces. Each suitcase were equipped with a photocamera, kind of a map, kind of a container, and instructions.  One suitcase represented an anolog version (Analog camera, paper maps, suitcase box for additional artworks) and a digital version (digital camera, digital map with QR Code, USB Stick as a container for additional digital artworks). People were supposed to take the suitcase with them and add some personal value to it. Read more...