Drawing seeds
The databases of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are complex scientific and logistical tools. They include a large number of variables for every seed sample, including species, genus, date of harvesting, seed banks and countries of origin. In this project we have been following a few different directions for designing ways of making the content of the data-base tangible and/or graspable. These directions have to do with designing languages, interactions or expressions — both visual, spatial and colloquial. In this post we outline the process of visualising parts of the data-sets through the seemingly straight forward processes of sketching and illustration.
While the databases we work with in this project are digital, we draw visual and conceptual inspiration from botanical science from the 1700s and early 1800s. From this period there is a rich history of artistic practices and natural sciences overlapping through exploration, collecting, description, art and storytelling being important in the classification and categorisation of natural life. The Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was central in establishing the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature. This is the use of two part names for the scientific nomenclature of species: the first part identifies the genus; the second part identifies the species within the genus — for example ‘Oryza sativa’. Linneaus’ taxonomy is central for understanding and navigating the Seed Vault database, but Linneaus is also an interesting example of the form of rich, interdisciplinary, and often romantic, research practices taking place in the 18th century.
In 1732, when Carl Linneaus was 25, he travelled to Lapland in the north of Scandinavia on a scientific expedition funded by the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. The aim was to discover new plants, animals and, possibly, valuable minerals. The botanical observations from this journey became the basis of the book Flora Lapponica (1737) in which Linneaus’ taxonomy was first used in a practical way. On this expedition Linneaus kept a journal that was published in English in 1811 as Lachesis Lapponica: A Tour in Lapland. A scanned version of this publication is available online through archive.org. Reading this we were struck by the richness and detail of the observations and descriptions. Linneaus observations of botany and zoology are intertwined with observations of local customs, farming equipment, folk-art, food and clothes, alongside crude, but beautiful sketches of everything the 25 year old Linneaus found fascinating (jellyfish, ploughs, dwellings, mythical nudes etc).
Linneaus’ sketches document his observations in the field and likely helped give shape to some of his ideas. But in communicating botanical studies more broadly, Linneaus and his contemporary botanists worked with botanical artists, such as Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770). Ehret was an influential European gardener, botanist and artist that was important in developing the Linnean style of botanical illustration. This style reflects the classification characteristics and taxonomies developed by Linneaus. Here, the systematic differences between plants are illustrated through the structural dissection and detailed illustrations of plants.
Alongside working with natural scientists like Linneaus, Ehret was typically commissioned to produced illustrations for botanical collections and stately gardens, often documenting exotic and rare plants brought to Europe from the colonies by wealthy plant collectors. Through this work Ehret developed a rich visual style documenting all stages of a plant through both seasons and the plant’s lifespan. Many of Ehret’s colour etchings are collected online through the Flickr galleries of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This is a great starting point for exploring the visual cultures of biodiversity. (The whole 117.015 image archive of the Flickr collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is an incredible collection displaying the visual cultures of natural science history).
Drawing as a way of seeing
The sketches of Linneaus and the detailed artworks of Ehret represent a span of drawing practices in botanical science — from documenting observations in a research process to communicating characteristics and relations to a broader community. The visual cultures of botany, from the Enlightenment to today, makes the science visible and tangible for all of us. It allows us to look closely at the natural world and celebrate the spectacle of its diversity and beauty.
We have wanted to examine how we can draw on this visual culture in our explorations of the Seed Vault data. We are not botanical artists, but as designers we also have traditions of sketching and drawing. While botanical illustrations are often idealised abstractions of the morphology of plants, design sketching can do similar things. Creative sketching in design can be about understanding the potential for shapes, structures and characteristics in products, websites or buildings, while analytical drawing is about analysing how objects or buildings are composed by highlighting specific aspects like geometry, texture, colours etc. This has been our conceptual starting-point for drawing seeds. We have used sketching and illustration to explore and make visible some of the diversity of the seeds in the Vault through producing visual materials for what is otherwise largely logistical datapoints.
We have used the database to find interesting or significant species to illustrate (like the most and least common ones etc). We have then researched the physical characteristics of the seeds of these species (through finding micro- and macroscopic images of seeds in databases such as that of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Services). And finally produced a large number of illustrations of seeds in the scale of 5:1 that allows us to take a close look at the visual characteristics of the seeds of some of the species that we otherwise only see as rows in the database.
The design theorist Donald Schön described the process of sketching in design as a reflective conversation with the materials of a situation. In a small way drawing seeds can be a way of beginning a conversation with the materials of the Seed Vault? How we further choose to contextualise and use these illustrations might offer a way for others to also engage with the beauty and spectacle of the seeds of the vault.
