Adopt a Plant : Interaction Design

The Design

The objective of last week’s sprint was to design and prototype an application to engage citizens around King County with research on plant health.

‘Adopt a Plant’ is a new way to engage plant lovers around King County to get involved with nature while simultaneously helping scientists with their research to improve plant life.

The application enables users to find (adopt) new plants around the area that could use their help. After visiting your plant, you can enter data into the app about your interaction with this plant: how many times you’ve watered it, whether you’ve used any fertilizers and any additional information you may have to share with the researchers. Users can also upload geotagged photographs of their plants, for added detail.

Reflection

While designing the prototype for ‘Adopt a Plant’ the question that repeatedly crossed my mind was how to keep the users interested in this application. One way to do this is by giving them an option to turn on notifications about their plants so that they can be notified when it’s time to water their plants or to find a new plant. In the future I’d like to explore the different ways to keep users motivated to visit their plants and to remain engaged in the research.

What I learnt

Before this project I hadn’t heard of Citizen Science before. I enjoyed the process of not only learning something new in studio but also actively participating in something I had just learned about. My favorite part of the project was designing the application through POP. It was extremely satisfying to witness an idea that I had on paper being transformed into an interface similar to that of an actual software application.