Plant Life Support System

Plant Life Support System is a design for an easy to construct, aesthetically pleasing, open source, and high performance life support system for plants in hostile environments like buildings. We will produce both a physical implementation of the design as well as a set of instructions so that others can construct similar apparatuses. The project will tie into a number of existing open source projects to create communities of indoor gardening systems so as to maximize dissemination. The project will be designed and prototyped at the Topological Media Lab. It will interface with existing media systems in the lab over standard protocols providing sensor data for media applications.

Team
Morgan Sutherland (electronics, project lead)
Jordan Yee (design)
Tobias Glidden (implementation)
Laura Boyd-Clowes (bioethical consultant)
Katie Lee (design)

Deliverables
- a working implementation installed in the Topological Media Lab
- a set of instructions for reproducing our system
- an extensive project log
- possibly a philosophical paper on human plant interaction

Features
- cistern with pump-driven water delivery
- potentially nutrient delivery
- electronic communication and control system
- aesthetically pleasing mounting brackets and containers