Planté
Created with Yash Sathe
A community based smart device to aid in planting saplings and enhancing a sense of purpose for individuals in the COVID19 context. I worked with Yash Sathe to create a plant buddy system which encourages users to take care of plants, look forward to watching them grow and contribute to a part of the community.
Open Research
We conducted user interviews and questionnaires to determine some of the common causes of stress and anxiety during COVID-19. We looked at factors like sleep time, screen time, extra activities and social relations from teenagers and young adults.
We approached our research from the standpoint of psychology to further find insights about the root cause of anxiety and stress. Of particular interest is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for meaning" and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”. They talked about logo therapy, and how finding a sense of purpose in one's life helps to deal with a lot of psychological problems.
The root cause that we found was that most people had to find a new sense of purpose and see how they fit into this new context. With change in lifestyle and social relations, this was one of the major factor which increased anxiety and stress.
Mapping out behaviour and mechanisms to enhance ones sense of purpose
Conceptualization
The concept of Planté is a smart device which encourages you to take care of your plant. It gives constant feedback to the user on the state of the plant and encourages the user to take care of it as if it is their pet. The integration with an app provides a community to which individuals can contribute and build a sense of purpose for themselves by helping others grow their plants, reading Q&A's, creating new display emojis and much more.
Emojis communicate the state of the plant to the user
Multiple sensors allow to monitor plant health and conditions