Ways of Seeing (again)An Interspecies communicator for a Botanical Museum
Mentors: Anna Smeragliuolo, Chris Downs, Jose Chavvaria
Duration: 8 weeks
Humans as part of the ecosystem are active members of the food chain. On the other hand they are also prone to disproportionately tilt the axis of biodiversity sustainment due to their exploitative habits around consumption. There are more than 7000 plant species in the world provided by nature for our consumption however only 3 of those fulfill 50% of our dietary needs(these are corn, wheat and rice). Orto Botanico (an agrodiversity museum in Bergamo) is trying to battle just that at the junction of Agrodiversity, education and Museum experiences. The musuem houses over 2800 diverse plant species.
This investigation led to a species communicator. Visitors can engage in dynamic conversations with the plant through Artificial Intelligence, which draws on the weather data(that the museum collects through embedded sensors) and the museum archives to authentically reflect the plant’s real-time biological state. Curiosity tokens attached to the back of visitors’ phones signal which lines of knowledge to surface from the museum archive and, through dwell time, allows the interaction to emerge without any friction of OR codes and buttons—as the plant calls the visitor.
Museum as places of contemplation
In its Greek form, mouseion meant “seat of the Muses” and referred to a place of contemplation or philosophical pursuit. What struck me most about this origin is the reminder that museums are not meant to be passive containers of artefacts or information. They are spaces for questioning, reflection, and reimagining one’s relationship to what is held within.
For me, this became a way to move beyond designing purely communicative interfaces. I wanted to explore whether it’s possible to create an interface that actively shapes a visitor’s relationship with plants and agrodiversity—specifically within the context of Orto Botanico which is a public institution, with more than 2800 species of plants and acts as a bridge between the citizens of Bergamo and education about agrodiversity.
“we would like to give to the people a new kind of language about biodiversity. When they see a tomato, they should speak about the tomatoes, non-tomato, because a lot of people eat one, two oe three different varieties of tomato and they don't know that there are in the world seven, eight thousand different varieties of tomatoes.” Francesco (Curator at Orto botanico)
Alienating Interface and Cognitive Overload
The open-air space, rich with greenery and diverse plant life, naturally invited sensorial engagement, and yet, visitors found the cognitive load engaging with the various communicative posters and the museum archival interface too demanding while walking through the garden. The reliance on QR codes as the main interaction point created friction: visitors not only struggled but also did not enjoy navigating the museum website on the go to get access to the archival data compromising the sensory immersion that the garden offers into nature.
“I look for a way that requires lesser mental load for me, for example summaries and quick comparisons” Gayatri (CIID student and museum visitor)
Sensory loitering and Curiosity (as the missing link)
Visitors were unconsciously connecting with nature through their senses—touching leaves, breathing in scents, visually absorbing the landscape. Yet they weren't able to deepen these encounters. Someone who smelled plants during one visit would simply repeat the same surface-level interaction on subsequent visits, as the museum wasn't facilitating growth or progression in their understanding. A crucial connection emerged between curiosity and sensory engagement. When someone leans in to smell a plant, that action signals genuine curiosity—and represents the perfect moment for deeper learning. That visitor might be ready to understand taxonomically and biologically why that particular scent exists, or why that species matters for agrodiversity. The current system missed these golden opportunities entirely.
Curiosity Reveals Itself in Layers
The museum had already been gathering knowledge across many registers: scientific and historic by the naturalist, poetic and philosophical references from their intern, and even regional recipes that tie plants to everyday life. Intuitively, they understood that people connect to plants through different lenses—intellectual, emotional, cultural, or sensory—but they didn’t yet have a way to activate those perspectives in the visitor experience.
What became clear to me is that each person’s curiosity reflects where they are on their own intellectual path. Some enter through memory or taste, others through wonder or science. None of these connections are lesser—they simply lie on a spectrum.
Rather than expecting everyone to start with taxonomy or expertise, emotional or personal entry points can precede and even unlock deeper engagement. A hook that can lead someone upward into the rest of the archive.
The Brief
The real challenge was recognizing and amplifying the moments of natural curiosity. This could perhaps be the only way to fulfill the mission of the museum, an agrodiversity-literate public.
And this is why Ways of Seeing (Again) investigates two intertwined themes:
exploring interfaces of intimacy with plants and flexible, adaptive museum experiences that can adjust to a person’s curiosity.
This included some sacrificial prototypes and experiments to be able to push myself to think broadly and creatively without being obsessed with the final outcome.
1. Plant as the Interface
One early exploration involved reading plants' bio-electrical signals
the signals indicated vitality but remained abstract. However, this exploration led me into plant physiology, revealing that plants are naturally conductive. This discovery opened a design possibility: touch could serve as direct input for interaction, eliminating secondary actions like button presses or QR scanning. The plant itself could become the interface, responding to the very sensorial engagement I had observed visitors instinctively seeking.
2. Bridging the Gap Between Looking and Inspecting
Inspired by the naturalist at Orto Botanico, I developed sensory worksheets with guided prompts: participants chose any plant and spent ten minutes engaging through touch, smell, associated memories, evoked feelings, taste (if edible), and texture. These became personalized memory banks, creating multidimensional experiential data rooted in direct encounter. However this was a one dimentional way to approach interaction in the museum as it left out the visitor’s Own Intellectual path and agency.
3. Embedding Plants with memories - what if they had memories of their own?
This sacrificial prototype served as provocation—for both myself and users. I designed a pocketable wearable that enabled visitors to navigate and store plant memories while wandering freely through the garden. The device used haptic feedback and light cues, with voice as the primary input and output method.
Building on the previous experiment, the prototype assumed that visitors would naturally pause at familiar plants, creating an ideal moment to embed personal memories for future visitors. When approaching a plant with existing memories, the wearable would subtly vibrate, prompting engagement without disturbing the natural garden experience. However, people’s actions proved far less predictable; their rhythms in the garden varied each time, and pausing at a plant depended on factors beyond my control. This provocation was never about implementing the idea itself but about learning from the speculative thought it introduced.
This opened me up to think of plant as stakeholders in my design and how to bring forth their identities as entities. As the plants became containers of memories, they might start emobodying those memories. What if they had memeories of their own?
Dwell Time
As I experimented with different sensors, the limits became clear—outdoor conditions and the need to avoid VR-style proved a barrier. Dwell time, however, offered a more natural and dependable alternative to sense sensory curiosity. I eventually prototyped using laser sensors as a way to sense presence without asking the body to do anything it wasn’t already doing.
Curiosity Tokens - Choice is a Ritual
The crirtical Question of adaptive Museums to an indidivdual’s Curiosity remained unsolved. This seemed impossible without collecting extensive user data before visitors even entered the garden. The most effective approach proved simplest. I thought to myself....how have I been uncovering people's curiosities till now? By asking. So, what if the museum just asked?
I gave people tokens (as tangible signifiers of their curiosity related to plants) or asked them to create a new one if they wanted. but mostly people chose from the existing ones. The choice itself provoked questions when earlier people had none, as when someone choses eating as their curiosity they admit to themselves that that is what they would like to know more about.
These lenses are categorised based on the different curiosities identitified in the research as well as the distinct perspectives emanating from the museum archive eg. ‘Can I eat it or NOT?’, ‘the story of domestication of the the species’, ‘History, origin and culture’, ‘poetry and prose’ and so on.
Shubham
Plant entities - Artefacts become the Archive
Embedding memories in plants had already pushed me to consider plants as their own entities that could have human tendencies and memories. And thus the artefacts themselves became the guides and the archive. The Weather and museum data became their memories and lived experiences in this case. I almost used the radio as a metaphor for different curiosity channels a visitor could choose from. While bodystorming a portable audio object, I found myself instinctively mimicking the posture of a phone call. That gesture unlocked the metaphor: what if plants could call the visitors on their own Phone. It felt more practical as creating a radio for each visitor in the museum would be expensive for the museum but also, the metpahor of the call is immediately understood by anyone trying the prototype for the first time itself giving them space to devote to just the conversation with the plant.
The interaction Flow
Curiosity tokens with embedded NFC tags clipped onto a visitor’s phone, carrying their chosen lens. A laser sensor placed near each plant detected when someone lingered within its radius, calculating dwell time until the plant decided to “call” after a time Threshold is Crossed. That call is triggered through the Open AI API linking the token to the Orto Botanico archive, while a layer of code gave each plant its own personality and way of speaking, translating its biology into a distinctive dynamic personality.
Plant Conversation ARC
The AI conversation flow was designed not merely to share information, but as a storytelling tool, using a narrative arc to take the visitor on a journey with the plant. The starting point is deliberate: the plant introduces itself first with its common name and then its scientific name, as visitors often remember plants by their common names and can relate a diverse species to its non-diverse counterpart from their life experiences. This start also establishes the plant as an emotional entity, with its own feelings, emotions, and memories of the day. In the second stage, the plant shares a story from the museum archive linked to the visitor’s curiosity. From there, the visitor and the plant go back and forth, into an exploratory dialogue. The open cognitive loop represents an opportunity for the museum to continue a visitor’s intellectual relationship with the plant even beyond the current conversation or the garden, potentially over multiple visits or even at home.
Testing Plant conversations in the garden were extremely fun and stimulating. Some validations were recieved and some Improvements to be made were noted.
“At first I was a bit timid, but then it became possible to go deeper and deeper with Punica granatum. What feels new is that he also speaks about me. We are used to giving information about plants in only one direction, but your tool allows for a true two-way exchange.”
Gabriele Rinaldi (Director of the Botanical Gardens of Bergamo)
“I also want to talk to the other life forms like worms, Insects and Bees that surround the ecosystem”Volunteer at Orto Botanico