Petplant: a physical-digital technology for fostering children's nature connection

This student project was carried out in the ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, UCL IOE’s Education and Technology MA. 

Written by MA in Education and Technology students (alphabetically): Raghad Albar, Hyeongseop Baek, Mandy Bastman, Yoyo Chan, Deepita Shukla. This project was featured in the UCL Knowledge lab 20 year anniversary.

 This work took place in the ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2023, we, the student team ‘Five Monkeys’ worked with the Europa school and a class of primary school children in Year 5 (aged 10-11) to develop a new digital tool that would allow children to explore their relations with nature. 

 What role could technology play in the context of nature?

 Our project started from literature presenting today’s children as removed from nature owing to a range of societal trends such as urbanisation and digital technologies that have added to sedentary lifestyles. In tandem, we wanted to move away from human centric lenses that approach nature as a resource toward a relational lens. 

 Connected with our own childhood experiences in urban spaces, we developed an initial design question that foregrounded the need for changing how children relate with the natural world, assuming that change was needed!

 Inspired by the cultural probes method, we carried out research with a class of 30 children aged 10-11 living in a rural context. Children were given 'nature bags' filled with soil, sticks, leaves, rocks, etc. Using the nature bags as inspiration, children were invited to create a story about nature.​ While the children were interacting with the nature bags, we observed how they interacted with the materials (e.g. Were they touching them? Smelling them? What did they do with them?)​. We also paid attention to the content of their stories (e.g. What types of activities did they engage in outdoors? With whom?).

Creative tasks and outputs. Credit: Team Fivemonkeys.

The sensorial and storytelling approach we took challenged some of our assumptions by allowing children to express themselves. Our discoveries included: 

•  Confirmation that technology was often credited to why children spent less time outside
• Children described nature in affective terms expressing appreciation 
• Children enjoyed a range of play and social activities outdoors, however their direct interactions with the natural world were limited in comparison
• Parents played a vital role in mediating the child’s relationship with nature, sometimes discouraging direct tactile interactions owing to them being unsafe or unhygienic 

 The workshops led us to take a new pathway charged with exploring if and how technology could trigger children’s curiosity to interact with the natural world.

Overcoming nature-technology bifurcations 

One challenge we constantly faced was the role that technology played in children’s sedentary lifestyles which became a challenge during the ideation process. To overcome this, we used ‘time’ and ‘space’ as a conceptual tool generating two ideas that we explored more deeply:

 A storytelling application allowing children who experienced nature interactions to share with one another stories from their hands on engagements in the outdoors. While these stories could spark new practices outdoors, technology was positioned as a tool for reflecting on nature experiences after they had occured
 A gardening app for domestic plants engaging children with plant needs through sensor-based monitoring and forging an affective relation through a pet avatar that acted as the plant representation. Mediated by children’s love for pets, and crafted over time through maintaining the plant, we anticipated the development of an affective care relation. This app also could address parents’ concerns on outdoor safety and hygiene since it instead situates nature indoors.

Introducing Pet Plant

After much deliberation we pursued the second idea generating a new prototype which we named ‘Pet Plant’. The technologies used to develop Pet Plant included a BBC micro:bit attached to a plant to detect light, soil moisture and temperature levels and an interactive screen-based prototype that visualised these outputs communicating their meaning through the pet avatar. 

 Conceptually, Pet plant (PP) moves away from human-centric needs, rejects the use of nature as a resource, and as such recognises that plants have intrinsic needs. To sensitise humans to plant needs, environmental sensing embedded next to the plant and an app visualisation are used. The combination of using the physical sensors and the digital app elicits excitement in children to care for a home plant in an otherwise everyday, mundane situation. In addition to providing direct sensory experiences with the plant, an affective connection between the child and plant is also solidified through the pet-plant avatar. In ‘animalising’ the plant through a pet avatar that communicates the plant’s needs, and using favoured pets and animals that the child feels close to, the dichotomy of child/pet/plant is creatively disrupted . PP thus introduces an expansive collaboration between child-parent, pet-child, pet-plant, child-plant.