TALK TO THE PLANT is a prototype of ongoing online social gardening research by Birgit Bachler. This project aims to bridge the need of people to play simple online games when they are online, with the emerging trend to home grown food. The power of the game-hungry crowd is combined with the possibility of microcontrollers taking over a gardener’s duties in order to create a playful environment for an online distributed gardening community. The prototype of TALK TO THE PLANT is about to be launched at the end of June 2012 and involves an online tool for communicating with a tryout-garden situated at WORM / moddr_ in Rotterdam. The URL will be announced >here< soon.

TALK TO THE PLANT questions the communication that is fostered by “social” applications and games online. Gameplay on social network sites requires not necessarily tactical choices of the players. The games rather ask them to spam their friends with invitations and requests that often leads to hiding or un-friending these persons. TALK TO THE PLANT could bring back a real social aspect to online gaming by connecting gamers with organic food devotees by feeding the first with missions and the latter with effortlessly home-grown fruit and vegetables. The prototype is a low-cost DIY solution for automated home-gardening inspired by projects like Garduino or Cheap Vegetable Gardener and once finished a complete HowTo Guide will be released for wild copying.

TALK TO THE PLANT will be presented to the public for the first time on Monday, 25 June 2012 at WORM, Rotterdam.

At the moment the DIY-grow lights are being tested on a subject and first results are to be expected the coming days. Stay tuned!