Biogotchi!
Jacqueline T. Chien, François V. Guimbretière, Tauhidur Rahman, Geri K. Gay, Mark L. Matthews · 2015
In this paper, we discuss the opportunity to use plants as living information displays. This work focuses on systematic plant manipulation for affective individual feedback. Building on centuries of explicit plant manipulation and recent work in HCI, we explore the combination of personal informatics and plant-mediated feedback. We argue that plant-based information displays could offer affective, multi-sensorial and sometimes ambiguous signs for users. We describe our plant manipulation system and report the results of four experiments in this novel design space. We provide guidelines and suggestions for how designers can incorporate plant-based information displays into their work and conclude by exploring specific domains where plant-based displays could be effective as information displays for personal behavior, harnessing their accepted use in everyday settings and affective affordances.