Marico is a pair of smart marimo terrariums that support loved ones, separated by distance, to nurture their relationship.
By spinning the terrariums, people can care for the marimos together, send messages to each other via colored lights, and feel a sense of co-presence from proximity sensor lights.

Project Overview
This project is a school project from the Ideation Studio course at the University of Washington's MHCI+D program. Over the course of 10 weeks, we explored ways to support graduate students to feel more connected with their loved ones at a home away from home.
Responsibilities
User Research
User Interviews
Insight Gathering
Sketching and Ideation
Concept Development
Storyboarding
Prototyping
Usability Testing
My Team
Cynthia Lao
Dongming Liu
Dominic Giardini
Janise Chan

Understanding the Challenge

Graduate students who move to new places for higher education find it challenging to make themselves feel at home.

Graduate students:

  • are financially constrained
  • have a limited social circle at the new place
  • uncertain about where they'll be after they graduate

These constraints make homemaking in a new place more challenging for this group. Though graduate students are a distinct target group, they embody characteristics that are seen within the greater population:

  • people are more transient
  • less socially embedded within communities
  • dincomes are falling behind the cost of living

Thus, designing for graduate students can also help us reimage home for a broader population.

Design Challenge

How might we support graduate students who are moving to a new place for a year to create a home for themselves?

Research

We conducted research to understand:

         What does home mean to graduate students?

         What are some challenges in making their new place feel like a home?

Interview with 6 Participants

We conducted 1-hour semi-structured interviews and a 3-day diary study with 6 University of Washington Graduate Students; I led 2 of these 6 interviews.

Session guide with participants
Diary study participant entries

Sensemaking

We extracted data from each interview, grouped participant data based on common repeating themes on Miro, and arrived at 4 insights, which we then combined into 2 main insights to guide our ideation direction.

Affinity Diagram using data from interviews and diary studies
Affinity Diagram using data from interviews and diary studies

Key Insights

Friends and family make a place feel like home, but the move has taken students away from people they love.

They miss the sense of home they get from:

-talking with their loved ones

-caring for each other through small actions

-enjoying each other’s presence.

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“230PM on a Friday afternoon. Majorly missing having lunch with my family back home after the customary Friday prayer at the mosque” -P1

People find workarounds to stay connected in order to bring a sense of their loved ones into their home.

To feel more connected to their loved ones in their home:

-people text or call friends and family

-recreate smells and tastes of home

-put up photos and mementos in their space

But there are still moments where they feel the absence of those they left behind.

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"I have photos of my nephew on my fridge because I miss him. He’s only 8 months old, so it’s been kind of tough and sad to miss all those big milestones" - P2

Takeaways:

Our initial desk-research driven hypothesis assumed that physical objects are important in making a place feel like home. However, after user research and analysis, we found that people’s friends & family are important in making a place feel like home.

Thus we redefined our design challenge:

How might we support graduate students to stay connected to their loved ones in their transition to a new home?

Ideation

Using the insights gained from our user research, I ideated 30 potential design solutions to come up with a team total of 120 ideas. We then transferred our ideas into Miro to affinitize and dot vote on our favorite ideas.

120 ideas
Dot voting on Miro

Downselection

After an initial dot voting session, we had 7 main clusters of ideas and found that we were drawn to ideas that fell in the later stages of the moving process - when students need more emotional support.

To narrow down even more, we came up with 3 design prioritizations,

and arrived at 3 concepts after a second round of dot voting based on these prioritizations.
3 concepts for design direction

One Concept Ideation

Through storyboarding and reviewing the concepts in more detail, we arrived at an unanimous decision: the plant-oriented solution.

We felt that plants offered a natural integration with one’s space to create a sense of subtle co-presence in addition to using it as a communication device.

Botanicus Interacticus demo
A project we came across during our research on existing plant technology was a project from Disney Research titled Botanicus Interacticus.
Their research explored the use of plants as an interactive interface, which can be used as a device for people or for responsive environments.
While drawing inspiration from Botanicus Interacticus and keeping in mind technological feasibilities, we further ideated on ways to use plants as a communication medium.
Ideation session on plants as communication medium
In 2 weeks, we ideated 120 ideas, downselected by dot voting, following design principles, using design matrices, and created 3 storyboards to arrive at our initial solution concept.

Initial Response

Our initial solution concept was a pair of technology-augmented houseplants that students can use to send and receive messages from loved ones, fostering a sense of co-presence and connection.  

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A user can touch their plant in different ways that represent different messages they want to send to their loved one’s plant. This input from the user’s plant would be outputted from their loved one’s plant as a subtle message in the form of color and sound.

USABILITY STUDY

To gain a deeper understanding on how users might use our design concept, each of us created a wizard-of-oz prototype for one key path of our concept and tested it with 5 different users, for a total of 20 users.

Interacting with plant
Interpreting message
Receiving notifications
Voicemail system with buttons

We wanted to know:

  • What kinds of non-verbal messages do people send and how would they send it?
  • How do people interpret the message they receive from the plant ?

We wanted to explore:

  • How do people feel about real-time vs. asynchronous messaging (notifications/voicemail system)
  • How do people feel about human-plant interaction (using touch, buttons, and voice)

Key Insights

People want to care for their paired plants as a way to nurture a living connection.

"I’m not sure which part I can touch...maybe there are thorns on it... or I would destroy the leaves and flowers.” -P1

“This plant would represent my partner and my relationship, if it starts wilting, that might be a sign about our relationship.” -P2

Having buttons on the plant or receiving notifications from it detracts from the its organic feeling.

“Adding buttons on it... it’s too technological, like a digital device...and it feels weird to say “hey, plant.” -P5

“...pop-up notification is not necessary... notifications filter unwanted messages...if the message is from my loved ones, I wouldn’t need to filter it, I'd take it in real-time.” -P6

People need to develop a new shared language with their loved ones to communicate how they feel.

“it'd be cool to code it with your loved ones. Everybody translates colors differently.” -P4

‍“I prefer for it to be coded on the plant...as a reminder...it’s kind of hard to remember the meaning of each color.” -P5

Takeaways

Based on this research, our solution should enable people to:

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Final Design Response

A pair of technology-augmented marimo moss ball terrariums
  • ‍Co-care: Users and loved ones can care for their marimo plants together.
  • ‍Communicate: Terrarium has colored labels that correspond to lights that users send as messages.
  • ‍Copresence: Dual proximity lights are used indicate when someone is near the plant
Blender render of a marimo moss ball terrarium

Design changes

To address the concern that people were hesitant to touch the plant, I suggested using marimo moss ball terrariums.

We still wanted people to co-care for a plant, so I further researched on how marimos needed to be cared for and found that they needed to be rolled by water occasionally to keep their round shape.

This detail guided me in designing the cylindrical form of the terrarium, because it felt the most organic for rolling the marimos.

Illustration of marimo moss ball concept, and interaction of spinning the terrarium.
It also informed me on how users would communicate with it. I proposed for the terrarium to be spun like a dial to point to 6 specific colors on its base. These colors would be pre-coded, but users can override the code with their own shared language using the provided prompt cards.
Example of provided prompt cards and pre-coded colors
I suggested to forgo the "voicemail" system with buttons and notifications because we wanted people to have synchronous communication and a sense of co-presence with our product. We designed our product to have just one button to connect to the Wi-Fi and turn the lights on/off.

To aid in synchronous communication and co-presence, we implemented proximity lights to detect when one is near their respective terrariums.
Use of proximity light helps users feel a sense of co-presence with their loved ones
Designed by Cynthia in Webflow | 2022
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