Flowers

FH-Joanneum / CMS 2022 ProWork IAD

Inspired by the library of the Miramare Castle, which reveals for the first time its treasure chest of books on botany, flowers, plants and gardens. A creation at once natural, artificial and artistic, the garden of archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Habsburg and his consort Charlotte of Belgium embodies an ideal of perfection, beauty and relationship with nature.

See here a summary of outstanding analogue as well digital interactive investigations and experiments for profound insights into a daily good. Four stories, how analogue research and digital experiments trigger creativity for unexpected new perspectives.

Martin Foessleitner FH-Joanneum 2022

foessleitner@mac.com

ProWork 1AD: An adventure about flowers

A project for the FH Joanneum created by Andrea Hurtado, Helena Opower, Lea Zucker, Georg Kiraly

Table of content

1 Introduction

2 Cultural meaning of roses

3 Experiment: let‘s experience roses

4 Experiment: the results

5 Final step: EROS

Introduction

This course was about disassembling a product or object, in this case a flower, into its individual parts in order to learn from its substance and get new creative input. We were asked to use these findings as a completely new source of inspiration for redesigning. But our group was not only concerned with the traditional dedesign of disassembly. We wanted to look at an even deeper level: the emotional level of a flower.

We chose a flower: The rose. It is a flower that is already loaded with many stereotypes and symbols. When we look at the rose, we never experience it in an unbiased way, but we already have an image and a feeling in mind. We wanted to test this theory in our first presentation, Wonderland. For our second presentation, we created something completely new out of our findings.

Cultural meaning of roses

To assign a symbolism to flowers, the so-called flower language goes back many centuries. In the past, it had even greater significance because with the right flower you could communicate feelings that were otherwise strictly prohibited by etiquette. Today, still many people know the language of flowers and the meaning of red roses is maybe the most popular one, because for centuries they are considered a symbol of love and romance in many cultures.

The symbolig of red roses is generally understood as love and passion. But even within the red roses there are differences of meanings, depending on the individual shades of the roses. A

deep red rose is said to mean that one is ready to commit and can symbolize a deeper commitment. Lighter red roses, on the other hand, represent passion and desire.

Where does the meaning come from?

According to legend, Eve secretly took a rose with her when she was expelled from Paradise, thus bringing it into our worldly gardens. The linking of the rose with love for Adam and deep feeling has run through the entire history of time ever since. In the Middle Ages, the rose was considered a proven love remedy, in Roman mythology it was attributed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and in Indian Tantra the rose symbolizes the heart.

Roses have always had a great significance. Already the ancient Egyptians used them as an offering to their gods. Roses have even been found in Egyptian tombs. This may indicate that they were probably used in burial rituals. After that, roses were mentioned in history books as early as 551 BC, and the Chinese imperial library contained books about roses. In Christianity, roses then became a symbol of Christ ‘s crucifixion and resurrection, with the red and white rose side by side becoming synonymous with Jesus‘ sacrifice. Although the rose had not yet evolved into the meaningful flower it is today, the English bred roses for their beauty in the 15th century.

Color meaning

In fact, each color of the rose has a different meaning. These can be used to reveal the different levels of rose symbolism.

Red: love, romance

Pink: Gratitude, admiration

Yellow: Warmth, happiness, jealousy

White: purity, grace, young love

Purple: enchantment, love at first sight

Blue: unattainability, the love that is not meant to be

At the very beginning, we started to disassemble flowers into all their individual parts. We sorted and analyzed the components, built new shapes from them, scanned them and played with them. So we followed very much the visual component. After a short time, we realized that we also have other senses that can be used to perceive the flower. We started to caress ourselves with the flower, to tickle us, to see which parts of the flower felt how, we smelled it, heard what sounds it could make and tried how the components tasted.

We found that the different touches, tastes, sounds and smells evoked different emotions in us. Memories of places, songs, people, etc. came up. This led us to the idea of making the flower emotional and finding out what it evokes in different people. So we went under the surface and thought about guiding questions for this.

Experiment: let‘s experience roses

In the next session with the whole class, we wanted to have our classmates feel something similar and see what in this case the rose evoked in them. We chose this flower because it has a stereotypical background and often evokes expectations. Therefore, we consciously moved away from the visual impression and analyzed what memories the rose evokes, regardless of its importance in society. We blindfolded our classmates and seduced them with all their senses. They were allowed to feel, be touched, smell and even drink a rose tea, and then reflect their sensory perceptions into our specific questions. After touching our classmates with the petals, stems and thorns, we asked them what emotion the flower would be. Then we played different sounds :rustling of dried rose petals, beating with the stem, lighting the petals on fire, etc.: and asked for an association with a color. After smelling rose water and rose petals, our fellow students were asked to find a place that came to mind for this. Finally, they were allowed to taste rose tea and associate the taste with a song.

Experiment: the results

All participants of our interactive presentation of the dedesign of a rose were asked to write down their answers and impressions to our questions on an A3 sheet. We collected these sheets after our presentation and evaluated them in an Excel spreadsheet for simple comparison. The results were very interesting and different and underlined our thesis that a blind perception of the rose, without knowing that one experianced a rose, evokes completely different images, far from the known stereotypes. The results of our interactive presentation are presented here.

Feeling/Emotion

When asked what emotions the participants felt after being blindly touched by different parts of a rose, they said the following: gentle, comfortable, white, light, soft slapped → by Krampus, special surprised by the coldness of the flower; comforting and soft soft, initmate, felt like being touched by a person → felt calm, in the moment

cold, hard & soft, warm

tenderness, ticklish, funny

calming, curiosity, fun

free, floating, grass in breeze

feels like gummi, surpriced, touching rose → soft smooth/softness warm welcome, happiness, coming home

love, fear

lovely, happy

Sound/Color

These are the colors that the participants associated with the sounds of a rose that we played for them.

(dark ) green

blue, green, brown

different greeens and blues

yellow-brown

brown, yellow, orange

brown

green

pink,red, brown

yellow

blue-greenish

purple-rose

blue

smell/place

scan me!

We had our comulitons smell different parts of the rose blindfolded and they were asked to indicate a location they associated with those smells.

Mall, Parfume shop

Spa, Cosmetic, Wellness Place

Spa

my childhood bathtub → smelled like some soap-balls we dissol-

ved in the water

sun, grass, field

a small cafe in Montmarte

bath

House in a forest

italy

beach in summer highschool

coffeshop, smelled like coffe

taste/song

We poured our fellow students a rose tea and let them experience it with their sense of taste. Then they had to name a song that came to their mind.

muse-supremacy

Taylor Swift song exp. Exile feat. Bon Iver

a lullaby

some slow song with just soft vocals and a gituar

bitter sweet symphony

smth from Lana del Ray, e.g. :Sommertime Sadeness: something by taylor swift or comfy song

smooth jazz

last christmas

Feliz Navidad, something Christmasy

/ no idea

see/animal

For the last sense, the sense of sight, the participants were allowed to take off their blindfolds and we showed them a color gradient of the colors of the rose and they had to name an animal that they perceived.

catapiller

flamingo,caterpiller, butterfly

leopard

small rainforest frog

parrot

fluffy rabbit

bunny

tropical frog

Butterfly

bee, a flamingo/frog

Zebra, Tiger

hummingbird

Person

With all these experiences in mind, they should now imagine a person.

busy women in her 30s

my boyfriend

a grandma who dresses colorfully

my grand-aunt

a friend

middle-aged women living in france and leading a decadent lifestyle

some nice grandma, living in the countryside, who loves gardening

a grandma

a beautiful girl

an actress

my dreamed future girlfrind

a lovely stranger

Flower

And finally, the participants were asked to draw the flower they thought they perceived through all 5 senses. Some recognized the rose, but not all.

ROSEEROS

With the result gathered from everyone in the class, we came out with a brand that sells cocktails in a bottle. Called Eros, which is rose but spelled backwards, we came out with the identity of it based on the answers of everyone. Also, we selected three animals from the answer everyone gave for the question which animal comes to mind when you see this color palette.

The flavour of tenderness.

The three animals we selected were hummingbird, leopard, and flamingo, and we gave each beverage a personality based on the answer they gave for the questions If this experience was a person how would it look like: How did you felt after being touched with the flower: And which location this smell reminds you:

We also did a short introduction video, in which we used one song from the answers our classmates gave as well as we did a playlist with all the songs that came from that question.

The end

For us, it was so interesting to create a brand through this process, it gave us an idea of the type of brainstorming we can do to achieve a concept or idea and how interesting and fun, involving other people was. We realized how much our backgrounds, ways of thinking and personalities differ and it’s so interesting to understand everyone’s point of view with activities like this.

© Andrea Hurtado, Helena Opower, Lea Zucker, Georg Kiraly

TOPIC

As an introduction to the course, all groups received a bouquet of flowers in their hands. Delighted, we looked forward to the semester's assignment. We were to experiment with them in every conceivable way - burning, boiling, freezing, soaking the flowers in oil for a few days, or blowdrying the flowers. We should pick the individual leaves, flowers or stems, count them, cut them, crush them, dry them or powder them. No matter which direction we took with the destruction or de-design, the results and findings were written down and presented interactively in the next session.

WHAT ARE FLOWERS FOR?

According to The Flower Expert – a website that provides detailed information about flowers, including their symbolism, cultural significance, and care instructions, flowers have been used for a variety of purposes throughout history, including expressing emotions, marking special occasions, and decorating homes and gardens. They are often given as gifts to express love, congratulations, sympathy, or as a gesture of friendship. Different types of flowers can symbolize different things, and the specific symbolism of a particular flower can vary depending on the culture and context in which it is used.

– https://www.theflowerexpert.com

Quiz Question!

For the presentation of our experiments and at the same time the results, we thought of involving the audience in a quiz. Therefore, a question was asked live like in "Who wants to be a millionaire", where the audience had the possibility to guess the correct answer among 4 answer options via an app on their cell phone.

It looked like this:

1. What is the name of this branch? (Abb.1)

2. How many bundles does the River Oak have? (Abb.2)

3. What happens if you put the river oak into the oven for 60° for one hour?

A: it got burned

C: it began to stank

The River Oak

B: it can't break anymore

D: nothing happened

We could not identify this type of branch exactly. Of all the trees we looked for, it was the closest to the American River Oak. Since the American River Oak originated in the United States, it is not native to Europe. We could not find any reliable source (at least online) confirming that the American RiverOak grows in Europe as well. However, some other species of oak can thrive, but they do not resemble the branch we have. Therefore, we conclude that it cannot be an American River Oak.

– https://quercusportal.pierroton.inrae.fr/index.php?p=BIODIVERSITY

4. What’s the name of this flower? (Abb.3)

A: Gerbera joanasonii

C: Gerbera robertsonii

3000€

B: Gerbera jamesoni

D: Gerbera marcsonii

5. What happens if you put the gerbera into the oven for 60° for one hour? (Abb.4)

A: it shrinks

C: it melts

5000€

B: it gets curly

D: it get seeds

Abb.03

Abb.04

6. How many leaves does one gerbera have in average? (Abb.5)

Oven Experiment

We do not recommend putting bleeds of flowers to dry in the oven. Nevertheless, we put them in the oven for an hour for 60 ° to observe what will happen. 75% of the blossoms didn't change much. 3 out of four flowers just dried up a bit and turned brown. But we were surprised of the last 25%, because the flowers of the Gerbera Jamesoni started to bloom. However, at the later stage we realized that this would happen anyway, but the oven has accelerated this process.

10.000€

20.000€

8. On which planet humans planted plants? (Abb.7+8)

A: Mars

C: Venus

B: Pluto

D: None

7. What color mix do you get when you rub a gerbera on paper? (Abb.6)

A: green-blue-yellow

C: red-blue-purple

B: gray-purple-golds

D: gray-green-orange Abb.06

Plants On Planets?

This made us want to find out more about plants in space. Through deeper research, the answer "Mars" in question 8 was not quite right. So far, experiments have only been done on Martian soil. It was found that Martian soil contains few nutrients, and is also high in lime and salt, but that there are some plants for which this nutrient content is sufficient to grow: "They found that alfalfa grows just as healthy as it does on Earth without additional fertilizer."

– Researchers said in David Nield's article, This Is The First Plant We Should Grow on Mars, New Study Finds in: Space. August 2022 In: https://www.sciencealert.com/thisis-the-first-plant-we-should-grow-on-mars-new-study-finds ; accessed 04 Jan. 2023)

Since Mars is a cold, dry, and inhospitable planet that lacks the conditions necessary for life as we know it, plants fare poorly. Nevertheless, Nasa is doing research in this area. Because on Aug. 10, 2015, romaine lettuce was on the "lunch plate" of Expedition 44 crew members on the ISS - the international space station - for the first time. (Abb. 08) The special thing about it was that the lettuce was grown on the ISS itself. The first cushion was activated in May 2014, watered and has since been nurtured in an artificially created environment.

– https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/meals_ready_to_eat/

The Milkyway – Abb.07

Artifical Greenhouse on the ISS – Abb.08

9. What is the oldest fossil of a flower ever found? (Abb.10)

A: 200 million years

C: 130 million years

30.000€

B: 12 million years

D: yesterday

The Oldest Plant Ever Found...?

100 years ago, fossilized specimens of Montsechia were discovered in the Spanish Pyrenees. Scientists believe that it is an ancient aquatic plant that already lived with the dinosaurs, and that it is the oldest flowering plant on Earth. The fossils, an international team of paleobotanists has determined that this plant is about 130 million years old.

Interview Hightlights with David Dilcher, paleobotanist: "Well, since this is the Barremian, which is the lower Cretaceous, an age of 130 to 124 million years, there weren't very many flowering plants at that time. We don't say that this was the first flower in the world. I think the concept of the world's first flower is really a poetic concept, like

Abb.10

Abb.09

finding the world's first human. It is an idea. However, we could say that this is the oldest submerged aquatic plant that we have a fossil record of."

– https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/08/18/oldest-known-flowering-plant

10. How many times could you use a flower as a stamp until to refill again? (Abb.11)

A: 1 time

C: 5-7 times

50.000€

B: 3-4 times

D: 10-15 times Abb.11

Painting With Flowers

There are several ways to use plants as inspiration for artwork. One way is to paint or draw plants directly on paper or canvas, studying their shapes and textures closely and trying to depict them as realistically as possible. You can also use plants as models for more abstract artwork, using their colors and textures as inspiration or incorporating them into an artistic interpretation. Plants can also serve as motifs for collages, photographs, or other art forms.

11. What happens when you try to curl flowers with a curling iron? (Abb.12)

A: they get wavy

C: they smell like bacon

100.000€

B: they get brown

D: they get burnt Abb.12

12. What smell do the burnt roses have? (Abb.13)

A: fresh roses

C: delightful airbreeze

250.000€

B: apple chips

D: rosemary

Abb.13

13 . What says the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN)? (Abb.14)

A: Each plant should have only one correct name

C: Tasty plants are called deliciosa

500.000€

B: Plants have to be named after their founders

D: Plants can have up to three different names

14. How was this presentation?

A: amazing

C: waaaaaaaaaaaaoouu!

1.000.000€

B: aaaaaaamazing

D: merry christmas

Of course it was aaaaaaamazing!

Next Steps

The next step was to agree on a topic under which we would conduct the next experiments. Since we were particularly interested in scientific approaches and wanted to find out more about the Fibonacci sequence, which is based on mathematical formulas, we agreed that we wanted to see the entire plant world in zeros and ones.

The Fibonacci Sequence

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. It starts with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and continues indefinitely. It was named after Leonardo Fibonacci, who discovered it while studying the ideal reproduction patterns of rabbits.

– https://www.cantorsparadise.com/how-to-find-numbers-in-nature-6c0e1b21cd21

Fractal Branching

Fractal branching is a pattern that is characterized by the repetition of a detailed shape at increasingly smaller scales, creating a complex overall structure. This phenomenon is found in a variety of natural structures, including tree branches and snowflakes.

This is the process of creating a complex shape by repeating a simple prototype at smaller scales. This can be demonstrated using the example of a tree branch. A single branch splits into smaller branches, which then split into even smaller branches. This process creates a tree with many branches that can be seen as an assembly of smaller, similar-looking trees.

–

https://www.cantorsparadise.com/how-to-find-numbers-in-nature-6c0e1b21cd21

Is everything in the universe made of 0s and 1s?

Yes in a sense. Atoms are just a biological, more complex version of 1s and 0s. The world consists of 0 and 1, as well code is binary. We look into the binary/mathematical things in flowers as the fibonacci sequence or the flower of life and create a collection of different digitized flower art created by code and computers.

Infinite Herbarium

What is it?

Infinite Herbarium is an exploration of art, nature and technology. Infinite Herbarium aims to expand our experience of the diverse botanical world - creating connectivity to plants and their threatened ecosystems. Through a process of interactive learning and art production, participants' encounters with real world plants are filtered through data sets and historical archives using a combination of Machine Learning techniques. Connections across botany, data and art seed imaginative encounters with curious hybrid species - creating a digital reflection of the constant flux of living systems.

– https://infiniteherbarium.withgoogle.com/

How does it work?

Using similar technology to that which powers Google Lens, participants are invited to create a plant ‘morph’. Two plants are identified. The visual characteristics of those plants are fed into a ML model that has been trained to generate mutating plant images through exposure to scientific illustration data, made available in the open source

Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Who developed it?

Caroline Rothwell is a Sydney-based visual artist whose work tackles important conversations about human interactions with nature throughout history — and their lasting effects. In her latest body of work, she hopes to bring attention to the plants around us we so often take for granted. She wanted to see if technology could help her use botanical data from historical archives to educate people about the natural world. So with the help of Google Creative Lab Sydney, she began exploring how machine learning could interpret archives and datasets to create new art. Together, we built Infinite Herbarium, a web application as well as a participatory art installation, in which users can explore an infinite number of machine-learning-generated plants, creating their own artwork while learning more about the plants in their own backyard.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCStSJVe4oo

https://experiments.withgoogle.com/infinite-herbarium

https://infiniteherbarium.withgoogle.com/

https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/infinite-herbarium/

Ai Generated Pictures

This approach can be summarized as sets of AI aided or complex mathematical aided solutions to create high-performance and extremely intelligent design iterations that aid in resolving difficult problems, such as reducing component weight, improving performance, and streamlining designs. Following keywords were used for our aproaches:

Realism

A real picture of a Platycodon Grandiflorus for comparison

anything with flower surrealism renaissance

renaissance

impressionism

fibonacci

With the tools listed below, we could also create art using artificial intelligence. It is worth mentioning at this point that the machine, which finally generates art, must be fed with certain parameters. To create AI art, you have to type in some keywords so that the machine "knows" in which direction to create it. Of course, the machine needs a database from which to assemble these images, or material to which it can refer. This process is called "machine-learning". Feeding the machine with material, which the machine eventually works with.

For some machines, such as the Infinite Herbarium, custom art was made for the machine to work with. Here, no copyrights were violated, as all artists whose art ended up in the machine left their consent.

For other machines on the net, mostly free-ware, this is not always true. This is because many machines source online, to the detriment of all artists who share their portfolios online with the community, but not gave their permission to use them for machine-learning. This is a very serious copyright infringement.

Reccomendation To Use Ai-art

Therefore, a note on ai-generated art: if one uses these tools, one can consider the generated images as a kind of inspiration, or jumpstart - use them as references for New Art in a supportive way. But never declare such an image as your own and use it for public purposes, because it always contains content from other artists. Note: Copyright expires 70 years after death, so styles by Van Gogh, Monet or Picasso may be used.

Now that we have looked into the infinite herbarium through mathematical formulas and codes, we wanted to create live ai artificially generated images about flowers together with the whole class. For this we used the following tools:

Text to image from https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img

Generative AI: https://www.unite.ai/what-is-generative-ai/

We asked the class to fill in the missing words in following questions:

a (name of flower) placed in (place) with a (thing) next to it

a (name of flower) being (verb) by a (animal) with lots of (emotion)

(number) of (name of flower) in a (style) style that are (verb) in (location)

(name of flower) being (verb) by roboters in (country) in a (artist) style

(name of flower) growing in (location) in (color) colors

Additional Note

Unfortunately, we saved the generated images incorrectly in the live session and therefore they could not be included in this documentation.

Generative Art

A similar approach to the topic is that of programming. Generative design can be created through self-written codes in program processing. Such a code looks for example like this and can be used to create flowerlike pictures or change the style of images:

The example above is based on the code from : http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/2/sketches/?01_P/P_4_3_1_01

When you move the mouse from the left to the right, the Image become more and more detailed.

Live Session with Generative Art

When presenting our results, we asked the class to make a drawing of a flower on a piece of paper. This was then photographed, converted to black and white in the image editing program and then incorporated into the code.

Digital Editing

For our last experiment we edited pictures of flowers with the help of digital features.

We worked with procreate and used different tools to change the original picture. For this experiments we used the function „liquefy“. By just setting some parameters and putting the pen on the screen you can edit the picture.

So it's really easy and not really comparable to the effort because the program does the most of the work.

We find this quite interesting because you would not compare it with some handmade stuff but you wouldn't also say that it's made by AI, so it's something between.

The goal was basically to play around and to see if you could edit these pictures so much that you won't notice the original next to it.

Anyways, we didn't edit the colors, so we think it is still possible to evaluate the original picture. But let's test this all together by playing memory.

https://puzzel.org/memory/play?p=-NJPLg7MIR5dFpX30xxH

IMAGE SOURCES:

Abb.3: https://www.guide-to-houseplants.com/images/gerber-daisies-pink.jpg

Abb.8: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/ iss044e033362-veggie1_1.jpg

Abb.10: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/08/18/oldestknown-flowering-plant

Abb.14: https://www.bionity.com/de/lexikon/Internationaler_Code_ der_Botanischen_Nomenklatur.html

Abb.15: https://miro.medium.com/max/4800/1*W9r2SCrM8n8uu1jAlsDZA.webp

Abb.16: https://miro.medium.com/ max/4800/1*Bw388SMN9A5USQHSDKzYpw.webp

Abb.17: https://miro.medium.com/max/4800/1*dHSAP1r6e31oBOf07Q8Tfg.webp

Abb.18: https://miro.medium.com/max/1230/1*JaKl4bLVN9aqy5KaPslSrQ.webp

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Flower

Flowering plants are plants which produce flowers as their reproductive structures. They come in a great variety of shapes and sizes and include grasses, sedges, rushes, many trees, as well as familiar plants like daffodils and daisies. Flowers often, though not always, have brightly coloured petals. The flowers conceal inside them the female ovules which will be fertilised by pollen grains. The pollen grains are the male parts of the flower. Fertilised ovules develop into the seeds from which new plants will grow.

Prowork 1IAD

CMS 22

Theresa Dietinger, Edwin Lang, Anine Hallén,

Carolin da Silva Nasseri, Nadja Pirchheim

the intro

Inspired by Ken Miki’s book “Apple: Learning to Design, Designing to Learn” we were given the task to de-design and explore flowers in a way we never have before. In the first part, we acted against our natural instinct to preserve the delicate flowers and let our creativity run free. Afterwards we deconstructed the flower in a different way and explored the idea of the perfect flower. Lastly, we took a look at the lifespan of a flower and the journey it goes on throughout its life.

the deconstruction

the blender

We put some flowers in a blender and were surprised by how easy it was to write and draw with the resulting watery mixture.

A lot of our experiments involved knives. We scraped, crushed and cut to make confetti and even tried to cut thin “sewing threads”.

the knife

the lighter

At first we unsuccessfully tried to burn a flower. Then we soaked it in alcohol and were really surprised that when the impressive flame went out, the flower was dry but not burnt.

We attempted to create aesthetically pleasing ice cubes by freezing flowers. Lack of temperature control resulted in unclear ice. Upon melting, the flowers lost color vibrancy and petal firmness.

the freezer

Using what was left over from the blender project, we tried to create a sturdy bowl by baking it. But even after a long time in the oven, the blended flowers were still soft and we ended up with some type of flower cake.

the oven

the hand

We also did a lot of experiments using our hands as our tool. This resulted in sticky fingers, colorization, smaller particles, interesting shapes and patterns.

the perfect flower

After our deconstruction process, we wanted to find the perfect flower. Therefore, we divided the flowers into the three components: stem, leaf and blossom. To determine the best of each component, we did a workshop with the whole class and let them decide.

The picture to the right shows the outcome of our workshop session and represents the students’ perfect flower.

the lifecycle of a flower

Seed

Where will we plant our flower?

Zapotitlan salinas Botanical Garden, Mexico

Gravdalen, Jotunheimen, Norway

Haselschacher Buck, Vogtsburg, Germany

Guilin, Guilin, China

Sprouting

When does our flower sprout?

Too late

When it feels like it

Bloom

Which flower is unveiled?

Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)

Sunflower (Helianthus)

Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)

Lavender (Lavandula)

Use

What will the flower be used as?

A “I-am-sorry-I -am-an-idiot-gift”

A delicious meal

As tacky decoration in a hotel suite

As decoration in a cocktail

Rotting

How will the flower die?

Forgotten in a vase

Pressed as a beautiful memory

Used as dye

Thrown away in the trash

The Story

Here is the chosen Story

Gravdalen, Jotunheimen, Norway

As decoration in a cocktail

Pressed as a beautiful memory

Seed

HUMAN AI

We are traveling with our spaceship through the galaxy when an asteroid hits us, takes us with and finally we land on Earth. In Gravdalen. We are glad that it is not so hot there.

There was once a small seed that was planted in the rich soil of Norway. It was a quiet and peaceful place, surrounded by towering trees and the cool, crisp air of the northern winds. The seed lay dormant for many months, waiting patiently for the right moment to sprout. It knew that it’s time would come, and it was ready to embrace the challenges that lay ahead.

Sprouting

Our dear dear flower is sprouting in cold cold Norway. The harsh weather conditions really took a turn on our sprouting habits. It does feel like moving more south, getting a little bit more sunlight and it’s just sprouting whenever it feels like it.

Finally, one day, the seed felt the warmth of the sun on its tiny, delicate shell and knew that it was time to awaken. It began to push its way up through the soil, reaching for the light and the air above.

Bloom

HUMAN

The Peace Lily blooms whenever is wants. Mostly it starts to bloom at night on the full moon. Sometimes when the moon is red it changes color and then you can smell parfume. It likes the cold and winds but sticks when it’s warm. Can not live more than a day.

As the days passed, the seed grew and flourished, becoming a beautiful peace lily with delicate white flowers and dark, glossy leaves. It was a sight to behold, and all who saw it marveled at its beauty.

Use

I feel wonderful as a cocktail decoration! It‘s such a happy and festive atmosphere when I‘m around, and I just love being a part of it. I know that some people see me as just a pretty flower, but that‘s okay. I know that I have so much more to offer than just my looks. I‘m also very proud to be from Norway - it‘s such a beautiful country with so much to offer.

One day, a young woman came across the peace lily and was struck by its beauty. She decided to use it as a decoration in a cocktail she was preparing for a special occasion. The lily added a touch of elegance and grace to the drink, and all who tasted it marveled at its unique flavor.

Rotting

A few days ago, I was a beautiful, independent peace lily, living PEACEFULLY. Then, violently, I was removed from my home, cut up, and placed unceremoniously in this cocktail, where I am now, woefully underappreciated. After a long, long night, now-AHH- suddenly I am very flat. Maybe this is peace again.

After the party, the young woman pressed the lily between the pages of a book, creating a beautiful memory of the special occasion. The seed that had once been planted in the soil of Norway had grown into something truly extraordinary, and it would always be remembered as a symbol of peace and beauty.

In conclusion, this project gave us the opportunity to explore flowers in a unique and thought-provoking way. We began by challenging our preconceptions and letting our creativity run wild through the dedesign process. Overall, this assignment helped us see flowers in a new light and appreciate their beauty in a different way.

the conclusion