Plant Friend

What if your plant could talk to you? Growing plants has been a central part of human life for centuries, but over the years the tightly rooted relationship has withered.

Plant Friend is an interactive flower pot to share a playful experience to engage with plants in everyday life. It is a playful friend to express different stimuli of a plant in a simple way of communication.

Plant Friend is designed to allow kids and adults to understand their plants’ simple needs and act upon it while having fun. Understanding how plants communicate is a difficult skill to master, however with Plant Friend, observing the condition of the plant is facilitated through physical movement from recognizable symbol arms. In this way nature and technology synergies into a new character for people to engage with.

Plant Friend is designed for children, but empowers anyone to understand and grow plants. Through the use of simple sensors, moving arms with communicative icons and a flowerpot with soul and character, Plant Friend stretches across language barriers to make plants directly available to people without a PC screen, tablet or mobile phone. Plant Friend provides an experience of how responsibility and hard work can result in growth and joy.

Plant Friend helps children learn by doing. Build from simple durable wood and designed with great sense of aesthetics, Plant Friend fits into both playroom, designer kitchen or even in office space. Colored arms carrying symbols for heat, light and moisture gives nursing advises while bringing the plant to life and bringing life to the situation. Children can talked about their experiences with plants in a social circle.

We measured data coming from a photoresistors, temperature sensor and moisture sensor using an Arduino board and connected that to servo motors to control Plant Friends movements.

This product is part of the “CIID Nest” platform as a start up for my company.

We want to develop, improve and make it better by showing it to people and have feedback from them. We believe that Plant Friend shapes in the hands of users so the best thing to do is share it in Makerspaces and Fablabs.