Ways of Seeing (again)
Mentors: Anna Smeragliuolo, Chris Downs, Jose Chavvaria
Duration: 8 weeks
How does it work?
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.
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 or 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)
The Brief
HMW build on the existing curiosity of visitors, educating them about agrodiversity through the museum archival data, without hindering their sensorial immersion in the Garden
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.I interviwed in stakeholder of our public museums like experts in Food studies, Visitors of the garden and people wanting a deeper connection with agrodiveristy
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)
Pain point: Scanning the QR code in the garden was an undesirable interaction for the visitors
Vistors were coming to immerse in the ecologicically diverse landscape of the botanical garden, to engage thier senses and bodies. Anything that needed the active utilisation of looking at a mobile screen was not interacted with. As a result, very few Qr codes ended up getting scanned.
Opportunity: Capturing sensorial cues of the visitors, could become an interesting input for getting the right information to them
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.
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.
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.
Provocatypes
meant to push the boundaries of the design.1. Sensorial Nudging
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.
The same thing as the worksheets, but this time, nudging through haptics and audio cues given while walking through the different flora in the garden.
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.
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?
- Garden Visitor
1. Nudging was not ideal in an open exploratory natural landscape. Experiences that could support Free exploration were gonna be ideal.
2. Sensory curiosity is only one of the many curisoities that existed in people towards nature, how do we cater to more?
3. The idea of storing memories in plants, made me think of plants as sentient being having memories of their own. So what if we explore plant biologies as a possible interactive element?
Prototypes
1. Plant biologies as Interactive Elements
This 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.
Copper wires were wrapped around the plant to detect touch in specific areas, serving as a way to sense focused interest in particular parts of the plant.
1b. Plants as living entities
This was about treating plants as the living entities they are, using thier biologies, as indicators to communicate or interact with. I built a bot for people to be able to chat with the plant, using the time of the day as indicator of the plant mood.
Slowly, I gave the plant more context about its own history by connecting it to the museum archive, and it became its own guide.
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.
Shubham
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.
Plants as the artefacts themselves became the guides and the archive. The Weather and museum data became their memories and lived experiences in this case. They are the sole narrators of their own story.
Curiosity tokens
Finalising Form factor
The tokens were fitted with NFCs to detect the kind of curiosity being chosen by the visitor. the look and feel of the token was also experimented with different materials, finally. landing on a pop mould rather than a plastic 3D print as an effort to remain true to the sustainable missions of the topic and the museum.
Creating a custome WebAPP for the experience
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
Using the Phone call as the metaphor made the design very accessible and scalable to any museum or artefact. In reality this can be used in any museum to replace traditional guides. The plant conversation could be taken to other entities of nature like fauna or even the ecosystem/mother nature as an entity.However, I’d like to explore the intimacy of human–plant conversations and develop a metaphor that makes the experience feel more real, as the phone still feels somewhat out of place when talking to plants right in front of you.