Botanycaring: Rethinking Human-Plant-Relationships through Caring Sensory Interfaces

Humans-plants relationship is known since ancient times. Nevertheless, our relationship with nature is everything but “natural” and it is an artificial construct derivative in dynamics of control focused on human well-being, such as food, medicine, contemplation, and even company. Botanycaring starts from a personal inquiring about our affective and intimate relationship with plants. Thus, it draws a design approach inspired by Michael Pollan's concept about the “dance of domestication”. Botanycaring proposes speculative design inspired by Pollan’s Botany of Desire’s chapters: sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. These are used as interfaces concepts for proposing human body-plants rituals that re-think caring interactions between them. Botanycaring discusses the need to design artifacts – meaning artificial – to re-think our relationship with plants by changing its dynamics of power. Also, it looks forward to provoking questions and design explorations that ask about how we can design nature within ecologies of care, integrating the feminist perspective of care in techno-science thinking proposed by María Puig de la Bellacasa as an essential aspect in the process of thinking and knowing the otherness: thinking with and thinking to, as ways of building worlds with and for others. Furthermore, Botanycaring explores what happens if home plants dynamics are based upon and driven by human body resources, intimate gestures, and rituals, designing the above for more-than-human worlds and skins.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Diana Sanchéz

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 290-294

Affiliations

[0001]Rhode Island School of Design

Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.38

SO-VID: cf987e03-9de9-48a9-917c-fbf3c29b8625

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.38

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

H Briggs (2019) Plant extinction ‘bad news for all species’. BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48584515 ( 28 July 2021 )
H Byung-Chul (2019) The disappearance of Rituals. Herder Editorial, Barcelona.
M Pollan (2001) The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. Random House Trade Paperback, New York.
A Pownall (2019) We don’t have the power to stop our extinction. Dezeen. http://www.dezeen.com/2019/02/22/paola-antonelli-extinction-milan-triennale-broken-nature-exhibition/# ( 28 July 2021 )
M Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) Thinking with Care: Nothing Comes without Its World. The Sociological Review, 60 (2),197-216.
M Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in more-than-human worlds. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
A Weber (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

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[1] H Briggs (2019) Plant extinction ‘bad news for all species’. BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48584515 ( 28 July 2021 )

[2] H Byung-Chul (2019) The disappearance of Rituals. Herder Editorial, Barcelona.

[3] M Pollan (2001) The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. Random House Trade Paperback, New York.

[4] A Pownall (2019) We don’t have the power to stop our extinction. Dezeen. http://www.dezeen.com/2019/02/22/paola-antonelli-extinction-milan-triennale-broken-nature-exhibition/# ( 28 July 2021 )

[5] M Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) Thinking with Care: Nothing Comes without Its World. The Sociological Review, 60 (2),197-216.

[6] M Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in more-than-human worlds. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

[7] A Weber (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

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