Planting Attention

I have been working on a few concepts to digitally mediate or support gardening activities through play, mapping and interactive content. But something always felt stuck. Something about the way our experiences are mediated by digital technologies and how it takes us away from our attention. So many of our communication technologies and social media platforms are set up to distract us, divide us and fragment our societies. They don't really bring us together. We read articles, make comments and produce content with a screen, rarely conversing with another human in the same space. We are always looking at a screen.

Is it even possible to design a digital devices and tools that helps us maintain the direction we intended to go?

At present communication seems to be all about broadcasting, and not so much about internalising, absorbing and processing. To have more meaningful interactions with each other and our environment, we need to slow down and take in what we are experience. I mean really take it all in with intention, appreciation and meaning. This is what we feel when we talk to somebody who really knows how to listen. This is what presence feels like.

What design features can help us maintain focus towards a more meaningful and cohesive direction?

Just as architects and interior designers plan out spaces for different purposes, the same is done for our digital devices. So can we shift the design of our tools to slow us down and to attend to the content and materials we are experiencing? I noticed how my e-book reader does this to some extent, except the interface is painful to navigate, and you can't navigate pdfs in any reasonable way. But the tension that forces you to slow down, to wait for the screen to load can be leveraged in another way. And instead of it being a failing of the technology, slowness can be built in to help you internalise and absorb the content you need to achieve what it is you set out to.

Where else can we find slowness?

Plants. Plants are slow. They grow at the pace nutrients, microbes, environment and their ableness permits. There are limits as to how large or fast you can get a plant to grow. At some point you need to work within the boundaries of their existence. Just like people. We need time to absorb content, to take in information, to consume nutrients. An app to grow plants needs to match the pace required by people and plants to plan, maintain and grow.

I have produced a few scrappy apps to plan gardens to grow edible plants. My hope is that we can have tools to grow food in the space within sustainable limits of soil, plants and people. A few years ago I was interested in companion planting, so I searched the web to find sites that could give me a small, yet compact dataset on companion plants that people might

like to grow in their garden. Most of them are edible, though there is at least one flower that isn't. And as with all things, you need to maintain your wherewithal and do your due diligence.

In otherwords, slow down. Your life depends on it.

My scrappy gardening apps (unapologetically in Suomi): https://puutarha.netlify.app/

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Images made with Stable Diffusion in Dreamstudio.ai