Plant.IO

Project>

Plant.IO

Role>

UX | UI designer, researcher, gamification designer

Client>

Teachers, students, educational organizations

Team>

Strategic Design and Prototype team at Infosys Limited, Palo Alto

Objective>

Plant.IO is an open source platform for the digital farm system and high fidelity prototype that represents the future of agriculture. This system is the new forms of software-driven intelligence and interaction to the plant growth cycle, while using easy-to source, off-the-shelf hardware to house, incubate, and monitor the germination of plants. Our team was motivated to create the gamification environment for the class participation with the purpose of their hands-on experiences in their science class.

Technical Platform>

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning, as well as data & analytics and the Internet of Things, are enabling new ways in which the digital, the physical, and the biological are converging across industries and all spheres of life. AR(Augmented Reality) was used for monitoring the plants, giving them water, adjusting the pH levels, and helping them grow through this virtual experience with MS HoloLens. Digital twins & Gamification was used for the fun way of data visualization and also provided the educational kit for the whole class room to create an engaging, interactive 3D game interface to interact with, grow, and control their own plants.

Contribution>

As a UX / UI designer, I contributed to design Gamification System by creating UX flows of the system, making the UI interface of prototypes, creating visual concepts of the game such as the character, the island environment. Also, I created 3D models, animation effects of the watering, pH, nutrition level adjusts for the HoloLens experience.

Motivation to create the gamification system for the class>

• Mundane UI
• Lack of the spacial environment and interactive visual element
• Feeling the necessity of the community participation
• Feeling the necessity of the personalized user control page

Gamification elements>

• Narrative & Conversational approach
• Character profile
• Game-like virtual floating island environment that represents the whole classroom plant units

Automation vs. manual set up>

Even though this system performs the automation based on the preset input data, each student can adjust the frequency of the watering and pH range manually by themselves.

Color abstraction>

In the virtual island world, each plant’s color represents the healthy level of the plant. Green is the healthiest, yellow and red is the next level. They easily know which plant needs to be taken care of.

Control Tower>

Control Tower represents the central control system that enables students or teacher to adjust the pH range for the whole class room unit before one week. Through this decision making process, cooperation and discussion in a class group take place before their decisions. Also, this group experience manages the whole plant unit together by helping each other as well as managing their own plant.

Individual management>

Each student can manage their own plant through observation and journal recordings so that they can participate with both physical and digital interactions.

Interview with each student and teacher>

• Before designing the gamification system, we interviewed with each student and teacher group to ask their opinions about initial data visualization system and found out the challenge points.
• According to the teacher and student group’s feedback, we designed the game-like digital system for their learning and cooperation experience.
• They were satisfied with the current digital farm system in terms of the difficulty levels, learning, and cooperation in a classroom.
• Teachers said that they are willing to adopt this digital farm experience in their science class as its group exploration.

Student and teacher group visit the design team>

• They showed enormous passions toward AR(MS HoloLens) experience.
• Teacher guided students to the design team members regarding their future career paths.