Touchology: Peripheral Interactive Plant Design for Well-being

Abstract

We present Touchology, a series of interactive plants that explore serenity and emotional attachment through meditative touch of plants with interactive audio-visualizations. Our approach focuses on creating various audio-visualizations for tactile interactions with living plants to enhance relationships betweeen the plants and users while evoking their empathy. Touchology was designed to offer a passive form of interaction. Our project offers a calming point of focus when needed. We particularly approached two populations (children with Autism and older adults in an elderly home) because it is known that both groups have limited access or have barriers to nature but they would still enjoy. Due to simple technical setups, the projects presented here can be placed anywhere at the ease of a user. Preliminary studies with target populations indicate that calming tangible interaction with plants evokes mindfulness in a similar way to gardening related experiences.

Keywords

• touch
• interactive art
• audio-visualization
• empathy
• therapeutic design
• children with autism
• older adults
• periphery interaction