The plANNter
The plANNter is a hyper-personal design for a Berkeley neighbor named Ann. Over the course of several interviews, we learned that Ann is a grasshopper, an artist, and a gardener - her illustrations have appeared in her late husband’s children’s books, and her still life paintings have been commissioned by the Cheeseboard collective. Her home houses over 70,000 books, and her garden yields a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including herbs that she keeps in pots close together to make watering by hand easier, although deer sometimes come to eat the vegetation in her front yard. To keep deer at bay, she is considering building a fence. To address Ann’s needs, we built a small deer-deterring herb planter. As a deer approaches, the planter will blink lights and make noises.
The planter is made of laminated plywood connected with small finger joints. A hidden compartment contains a microcontroller (Arduino Uno) driving individually addressable LEDs and a piezo speaker based on distance input through a proximity sensor. Since Ann doesn’t use much technology in her life, we made design choices to hide and blend in electronic components to look as natural as possible. The components are embedded in a story panel engraved with her interpretation of Aesop’s fable “The Ants & the Grasshopper.”
This project was a collaboration with my teammates Stephanie Defarra, Maria D'Azevedo, Ariel Lung, and Alison Waller, as a project for NWMEDIA C190-003: Critical Practices with Prof. Jill Miller in Fall 2018. For this project, I conducted the interviews together with Stephanie. I was responsible for the design and fabrication of the planter box: this involved laser-cutting, sanding, wood-gluing, and weather-proofing all the pieces; I was also responsible for designing the integration of electronics hardware with the box. I also worked on the software design of electronics with Maria, and did the process documentation and photography of the final product. I’m grateful for the help of Citris Invention Lab leader Chris Meyers for advice and expertise in fabrication throughout.
