bloomie is a sensor-enabled plant pot that translates a plant's needs and environmental conditions into movement, light, and conversational interactions, making them more perceptible to humans and fostering interspecies communication.

The starting point of this project was the common phenomenon of overlooked, dying indoor plants, used as a lens to explore interspecies communication. The project investigates how a plant's naturally occurring signals can be made more perceptible to humans, encouraging people to engage with plants as living, active co-inhabitants rather than passive decorative objects.

How does it work?

Using embedded sensors, bloomie continuously monitors soil moisture, light levels, and ambient temperature. These sensor readings are translated into three forms of communication: movement, light feedback, and conversational interaction.

1. A stepper motor-driven moving base physically expresses the plant's state, standing upright when conditions are healthy and contracting when the plant is in distress.

2. An adaptive LED lighting system complements this visual feedback, glowing green to indicate healthy conditions and red to signal distress.

3. Beyond this embodied communication, bloomie also connects to a cloud network, integrating the plant into a shared roommate WhatsApp group chat where it communicates its needs, complaints, and changing conditions in real time.

Overall, bloomie translates a plant's environmental conditions into embodied movement, adaptive lighting, and conversational messages, making its state easier for humans to perceive, understand, and respond to.

Key learnings

Throughout the development of bloomie, the team strengthened its rapid prototyping skills by taking the project from concept to a fully functional interactive prototype within five days. The team gained practical experience integrating Arduino with environmental sensors, networking and communication APIs, programming stepper motors, soldering electronic components, and fabricating an embodied interactive system. The project demonstrated that the value of a technical system lies not only in sensing data, but in translating it into intuitive physical and digital interactions that people can naturally understand and respond to.

Designing for the More-Than-Human World

As a speculative design project, bloomie challenges to think beyond human-centered design by inviting people to reconsider plants as living, active co-inhabitants of shared spaces rather than passive decorative objects. By giving the plant an embodied physical language and a voice within a shared roommate WhatsApp group, the team explored how interaction design can foster more attentive relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. This process highlighted the potential of speculative interfaces to encourage empathy and meaningful engagement with the living world.