Zen — A Shared Meditative Space for Human & Plant
A biofeedback-driven meditation experience that bridges the gap between human and plant consciousness — exploring what it truly means to design with nature, not just for it.
Zen emerged from a design brief with a bold premise: study the umwelt — the perceptual world — of a non-human co-inhabitant and turn it into a creative work co-designed with that species. My co-designer? A plant.
Rather than designing a product about plants, I wanted to design with them. The result is a meditative interface that listens to plant bioelectrical signals in real time, translating their responses into a shared sensory environment that guides both the human and the plant through a mutual moment of stillness.
Zen challenges traditional user-centered design by asking what happens when we expand the definition of "user" to include all living things.
Professor Jiabao Li's Eco-Centric Design course challenged us to go beyond anthropocentric assumptions — to deeply study a non-human species and build something that genuinely honors its perspective.
I chose plants because they sit on the edges of our attention. We share spaces with them daily, yet rarely consider their agency or intelligence.
As climate change accelerates and biodiversity collapses, humans continue to treat plants as backdrop, resources to consume rather than beings to coexist with. Technology mirrors this indifference, built entirely for human attention. What if we designed systems that fostered empathy toward the living world, starting with the plants we share our spaces with?
Plants exhibit a form of electrophysiology — generating measurable bioelectric signals that shift in response to light, touch, and human presence. I studied plant neurobiology to understand how these signals propagate, giving me the foundation to translate plant responses into a real-time data stream.
Plants don't just passively exist — they respond, adapt, and communicate. I wanted to make that invisible conversation visible.
An experiment showing how plants respond differently to negative vs. positive human speech — evidence that plants are sensitive to their environment and the beings around them.
Three principles anchored every design decision. Ensuring the final experience genuinely honored both the human and plant perspectives rather than using plant data as mere decoration.
From EGO to ECO — a conceptual shift from human-at-the-top hierarchical thinking toward a circular, interspecies model of coexistence that informed Zen's design philosophy.
The design process was iterative and deeply experimental.
My first iteration was using plant leaves as piano keys and made a poster that I would hand around campus to allow others to create their own plant-based compositions. Then I moved to Garage band and iTunes music where I was able to create a song and view the visualizer.
Building the meditation interface with p5.js lib. and VS Code, and with color visulizer of frequencies.
User testing session 1
User testing session 2
I recruited 10+ participants for the Zen meditation experience. Sessions lasted around 10 minutes. I observed and then conducted brief semi-structured debriefs on their experience.
"It was new and different to meditate with the thought of plants as a co-occupant. But it was nice and calming."
— Zen participant feedbackIntroducing Zen Meditation. Web and mobile app where humans and plants co-exist in a shared space. I added journaling, emotion tracking, and shared growth visualization to deepen the human–plant relationship beyond a single session.
Hi-fidelity prototype walkthrough
Zen was featured at the University of Texas at Austin's Senior Design Capstone Exhibition in 2025 — a recognition of both the conceptual ambition and technical execution of the project.
The exhibition context amplified Zen's impact: visitors could sit with the plant and experience the interface live, many of them encountering the idea of plant intelligence for the first time.
Zen is a living project. The next chapter focuses on deepening the interspecies dialogue through richer data and broader reach.
Zen taught me that the most meaningful design questions come from expanding who we consider a stakeholder. When we design with nature rather than for convenience, we're forced to slow down, to listen, and to reconsider what interaction even means.
It also taught me that research, code, and empathy aren't separate disciplines — they're a single practice when you're designing at the edge of what's been done before.
