The core concept of ‘Mind map: participatory plant arranging’ is about augmenting the natural environment composited with the certain sensing device and providing users more soothing interactive feedbacks as they touch and smell of natural materials such as twigs and plants to trigger interactions.
Principally, I have been in search of how people encounter combinative events in probable time, which interactive media can make more accessible. ‘Mind map: participatory plant arranging’ is one of my on-going experimental research projects in relation to this concept, which allows people to arrange the choices and map their experiences in space and time. It is an interactive media installation with a plant arranging experience at the core.
Players who want to participate stick branches and dried flowers into the pre-fixed, empty holes in flower pots in order to play. Whenever a hole is filled with a plant, a corresponding sound from nature is triggered. When many plants are placed in holes, layers of sound are generated, which ultimately, create an environmental soundscape. In particular, I am trying to construct a narrative experience that is immersive in the way watching a film, reading a novel or playing a story-based video game. I applied the idea of plant arranging to trigger layered sounds to discover how these experiences shape the way people can be absorbed in the hands-on activity of arranging flowers to generate sounds from nature. The sounds will be layered incrementally as people place each additional plant and shape the arrangement.

Furthermore, since my last experiment along these lines, I have been building an interface for tactile, organic interactive experiences using natural elements, such as plants. I came up with the idea of flower arranging because I wanted to simulate the interactions people have with nature in an attempt to evoke the kind of emotional and aesthetic response people have when they interact with the natural world. I am curious to see if users might feel more relaxed, calm and/or creative while arranging the plants and whether or not they discover and enjoy the pre-set combinations of twigs and plants I’ve made that shape the soundscape in particular ways.
Therefore, the goal of my project is to design an experience in which people can use natural materials, such as plants, to interact with a device that detects the patterns of plant placement and generates natural sounds accordingly. Ideally, users will have a peaceful and agreeable feelilng as they participate in this experiment, and I will be able to observe their reactions to the simultaneous sound and tactile stimuli.

User Scenario
Users will find two empty flower pots with pre-arranged patterns of holes, and a bunch of plants. If they start placing them, one by one, randomly in the holes, they begin triggering the sound of nature, such as footsteps on dry leaves, rain drips, or brushing the foliage. An arrangement of a participant is expected to be the patterning process of one's own cognition. Eventually at certain point, they would find which combination of sound is more empathetically pleasing and cognitively sensible. Also, as a result in the real space, the shape of arrangement could be peaceful and agreeable experience for the participants.