Haoyue Lin is a designer from Beijing. Inspired by her interests in interaction, nature, emotions, and storytelling, she views design as a means of capturing moments, much like photography, writing, and music. Her passion for life fuels her enthusiasm for exploring diverse possibilities across different fields in her design work.
Education
2017-2021｜Product Design (BA), Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China
2021-2023｜Design Products (MA), Royal College of Art, London, UK
Throughout my journey in Design Futures, the focus has mostly been on exploring the possibilities of human-nature relationships. This project aims to cultivate the ability to communicate with plant ecologies in the ‘Post-Anthropocene’. Plantoids are future robots that operate based on plant senses, such as ultrasonic waves, olfaction, or root systems.
Dryad 1.0 is an ecological assistant within the plantoids, utilizing a language based on plant senses to facilitate communication and interaction with plants. As human sensory capabilities are extremely limited, despite plants being the largest social lifeform on Earth for the past 500 million years, humans still do not know how to communicate with them. Dryad serves as a translator and intelligent messenger between humans and plants by collecting signals, learning plant linguistics, and employing machine learning techniques, thus bridging the gap between humans and nature.
Through this new force of plantoids, humans can learn from plants how to adapt to the environment. Only after we learn how to cooperate and symbiotically coexist with other forms of life, can we truly achieve "evolution."
In the post-Anthropocene, as global climate change intensifies, humanity faces increasingly severe and uncontrollable ecological problems. Issues such as extreme weather events, depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and deforestation require urgent solutions. Furthermore, the interaction between humans and the natural world has become increasingly complex, necessitating better methods to balance this relationship.
Plantoids, an innovative technological product, aim to address the conflicts between humans and nature and improve environmental sustainability. Combining biotechnology, machine learning, and human-machine interaction, plantoids can communicate with plants and help humans better understand their needs. The design goals of plantoids encompass communication, production, dissemination, and coexistence, enabling harmonious symbiosis between humans and nature. In the future social context, people recognize the importance of harmonious coexistence with nature and strive to establish a friendly relationship with nature through the technological means of plantoids, promoting sustainable development of the environment.
