Nature commands color. A research based project on the intelligence of plants, questions the role of designers today

This project was born by a personal interest in the relationship between humans and plants. In the last couple of years the theme of vegetal intelligence is spreading out in many fields, from neurobiology to contemporary art. I found my first deep inspiration in the research of Stefano Mancuso, a scientist who was able to communicate to the mass, the importance of its discovery on plants. His message has been very well taken by Emanuele Coccia, a philosopher who is working since some years on those themes with his own tools. Paola Antonelli then, launched the XXI Triennale “Broken nature”. Here designers from all over the world were called to think and project on that theme. My personal research is based on the question of the language and communication skills of plants. I will research and question if colors produced by plants could be taken as an interface with us. From the latest scientific news we know that plants developed thousands of languages, exploiting all their senses. In order to deeply understand one of them I decided to focus my interest on grass. This choice is driven by the presence of this vegetal almost everywhere in the world and the personal experience everybody has with it. In this project I question the possibility for plants to react to environmental inputs by producing pigments that we could archive, study and understand. Throughout this path the theme of sustainability is crucial. The world of natural dyes leads to a lot of questions about it. The assumption natural - good or right needs to be de-constructed. I will take into account the possibility of reducing monoculture for dyeings solution by using the current waste plants produce in everyday life. By taking the role of designer as that one of a translator, I will set a method to extract and analyse the pigments, to archive them in a database and to explore all the design opportunities that this research will open up. The concept of using plant’s waste for natural dyes will be explored in different scales, proposing six design opportunities developed as future scenarios or maquettes. Final solutions is analysed in order to better understand the kind of resources needed, the impact each solution would have on its environment, the outcome envisioned.