Expressive Phyto-Extensions: Design and Engineering of Plant Wearables for Communicating Environmental Information

Human-nature relationship has gained rising attention in recent decades. There has been an ongoing perception shift on how humans interact with their environments. Unsustainable interventions have not been able to benefit our own species in the long run. Rather, the dearth of knowledge of how the eco-system and the environment operates has increasingly and accumulatively put us into conundrums. Existing efforts that aim for a departure from anthropocentric perceptions get challenged by issues such as lacking first-hand experience from non-human entities, limited understandings of their urges and needs, etc. This thesis acknowledges those challenges and continues the effort to help humankind be better informed of the ecological and environmental stresses in their surroundings through a more- than-human approach. In this thesis, I present 1) three prototypes whose design and engineering are centered around plants. The prototypes help the plant subjects to actively response to the environment and relay plant-detectable information to humans and animals. 2) a workflow that pertains to alleviate some of the difficulties when designing for non-human entities through context research and rapid prototyping. 3) a fabrication process that enables people from various backgrounds to be able to rapidly prototype with inflatable shape-changing interfaces. Expressive Phyto-Extensions, in near future, are anticipated to be integrated into a both biologically and computationally mediated system that can wholistically achieve the design visions discussed by this thesis.