Prototype by Max Ouwerkerk, 3rd-year student CMD| Breda, Avans Hogeschool
I started this project with the idea that I wanted to 'make' by this I mean: not to brood and search for answers through research for too long, but rather to make, experiment and prototype. With the aim of creating a beautiful and catchy final design.
My exploration within this project started with the story of Leslie, a character developed by Nina Kramer. Leslie's story takes place slightly outside the 'City' of New Canterbury, where people live in an altruistic society that takes care of forests and woods. In this story I read something special, Leslie is said to be able to communicate with trees, how this happens, and what she used by for was not yet figured out/developed by Nina Kramer.
From the questions I got after reading Leslie's story, I set to work investigating whether this is possible (Communicating with trees) and what this would look like.
I decided to position myself as a member of Treeconomic's society (The altruistic society Leslie lives in.) who, in the year 2070, had to explain to the rest of New Canterbury how this tech works and came into being. Soon I noticed that it is hugely difficult to bring something to the 'market' from nothing, people wonder where did this come from? How come we've never heard of this before? And how does it work?
I decided to build a prototype of the device they were using in 2070. This way I could build a story and world around the 2070 device and make it grounded in reality this way. I called the method of design building a 'Future-Relic' a relic from the future, something set in the future for me/us but in the past for the people in the future (2070).
I placed the prototype around the year 2040, based around tech of today and some speculative tech I designed the first Tree-Reader. A device that can enable users to translate bio-signals from trees into human-understandable messages. It gives a completely new dimension to the relationship between humans and nature, do trees really live? What do we do with the information we get from trees? What can trees teach us? Etc.
The end result was not only visually stimulating but also made people wonder what it would be like to communicate with plants and trees, exactly what I wanted.
People sometimes struggled to understand but found the end result very interesting, especially because they were multi-sensorially stimulated. I used both image and sound, the sound was even 3d so it was like moving around you.
When I look back on this project I really look back with pride, I got to explore hugely interesting topics such as Bioacoustics, The Wood Wide Web and designing for the future. I was able to work and build with 3d audio, animations, video and graphics and I got to work with inspiring people. Best of all, I was able to combine everything I wanted to do and it turned out to be a hugely interesting final project. I am therefore enormously proud of myself and everyone who helped me!
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