I once splurged $14,000 of a client’s budget on what can be best described as a “smart” living wall Biophilic living wall in automation systems. The wall possessed an primal form of self-automation that intuitively propelled it to engage in catastrophic techniques destruction. According to the brochure, its LED-operated grow lights and moisture sensors would self-regulate, and an app would notify the office manager when intervention was required. Cutting-edge advertized biophilic tech at its finest.
The reality was far less promising than claimed. The system determined unilateral self-governance, and sanitation procedures prioritized nutrient-rich water waste deployment (with manual overrides engaged on weekend timetables for added chaos) to Sunday at 3 AM. Nutrient towers aboard the wall would unceremoniously dump 40 gallons of water directly onto the desk below. And I mean directly onto, to the point of saturation. Sounds insane? Custom wooden desk? Check. Signed contract papers? Check. Elmer’s Glue: there for the painted nature vitpape that was submerged. The aesthetic was delightful, but possed the potential for great loss. Death irony still kills me.
Rita had the audacity to contact me on Monday morning. Spawned my new favorite quote to tell: Jennifer, what the actual #$%&… Swamp with vanity windows won’t do much. Can’t say I blame her, never encountered such expression from our office manager — indeed: she approached me with joined constructs capable of argumentative endorsement, flaming through the eyes (named imagination summons).
With my thoughts racing through potential explanations, such as a cracked water reservoir and failing moisture sensors, I drove to the office in Portland and was amazed at how quickly I reached the location.
The living wall looked content, boasting copious amounts of moisture as if it just completed an award-winning performance while the rest of the room looked like a tornado hit it. It was an absolute catastrophe. To add, every desk recollection was taken from the titanic which certainly adds some flair to the scenario. It was a complete disaster. The few remaining intern survivors were frantically using paper towels to daub pages of valuable tomes. The atmosphere was closer to a greenhouse.
Drastic system checks unearth the all too familiar comfort zone of being: “the smart controller had misinterpreted the system figuratively getting struck by lightning and as an out-of-season order override any backup command set to autoflow equal to ‘do not water’ flood every spigot tank until they burst soak everything and universally declared state of emergency sprinkle rain on everything mask any signs of drought. With reckless abandon the ‘intelligent’ improperly overloaded ‘emergency’ decimation ‘smart-controller’ must attention overload override override activate override universal dome-plug shield off ALL-ports GO! NO STOP deliver maximum burst fringe flow flooding WATER! Overflow Stage: EVERYTHING—soak area: WORLD CONTROL!” So, here’s a prediction: lots, *lots* of water poured unchecked from every spout.” Now, that fail-safe? Yeah, also spectacularly Citadel towers level in an evenly stacked pancake range of approximately one thousand feet guarantee this is failure expressly labeled “safety shut-off flow gauge sweep”.
“Off a wall, bash a desk! Is there any way I could surprise or impress the whole team of ‘safety otters?’” Marco, forever the calm captain of a ship in stormy waters, overheard me cursing under my breath.
“It is,” I said while my eyes remained glued to the control console. “You forgot nature is involved.”
“Heh, so you mean to say they still don’t get along?” That eyebrow raise of his… so aloof yet piercing.
That was a painful realization – the promotional images sent to investors were highly polished. The addition of organic systems in places usually inhabited by microchip based “lives” is probably one of the greatest challenges with regard to modern biophilic design.
Oh well. Ever since that incident, installing a $3.99 surge protector to a $14,000 system priced me out of a hand turned desk, and nearly turned most of the feeble “off the ward” book into paper, making add-ons for PDF daisy-chaining as the son of a longtime friend meant needing favours from document restoration specialists. It fundamentally altered my views about that disaster.
Listen, I’ve been fixated for ages now on trying to create ways to bring the outdoors inside, something my mother said on more than one occasion needed “a fire hazard with leaves” on the bedroom. In my professional practice over the last five years, though, I’ve watched biophilic design evolve from “that thing with the plants” to an entire world of smart technology, monitoring systems, and automated ecosystems. Some of it is astounding. Some is—well, let’s just say it’s the kind of thing you don’t fully grasp right away. Like, steep, water-damaged, rollercoaster steep.
My client Sasha figured this out the hard way when we implemented a custom circadian lighting system in her home office. The idea was brilliant: track lights that would gradually shift in color temperature, simulating natural sunlight patterns to help regulate her sleep cycles and energy levels. As a software developer, Sasha worked strange hours and suffered from terrible insomnia. There’s good research to be found on circadian lighting—these tools can do wonders when it comes to realigning your clock, even if your schedule is wildly chaotic.
The catch? We set it up to respond to her work calendar, so it would change with her activities. Important coding session? Blue light to boost productivity. Wrapping up for the day? Sunset amber tones, warm and soothing. In theory, wonderful.
“She has her reasons, but most freelancers have that corporate cell of a vitocracy that infects their mind. It starts with complete undiluted freedom; an unachievable goal. Then morphs into working 90-hour weeks,” she paused and quickly stammered unlike her usual soft in-shy and erover bearing voice. Last time I saw Gina, I mentioned she started getting a bit more dynamic in the way she writes.
“Well, I reckon all of it was going smoothly, more accurately ‘okay’ for just a fortnight. But…”
An overview on GPTILED gi – self-learning Hypothetial Artist Reserved Document Intelligence that are self-thrusted taught. Remember in history class when example of the hands-free lies, she pulled. Individual project launches are much easier because there are no collaborative deadlines!”
Sasha wore meek face with barely hiding herself blushing at the mention of all-nighter, but I maintain speaking as neutrality as I can, “exactly like I experienced coding at brightness over 1000 lumens in the office the ‘normal’ clock lied to me and tried shutting it off like if its deep orange friends.”
Then I tried my hand at “breathing walls” as an exercise for a co-working space in Pearl District. The inspiration came from a research article detailing how subtle exposure to movements akin to breathing could unconsciously regulate stress for office workers. We built stunning fabric panels with micromotors that would expand and contract in the 4-7-8 breathing technique. They were gorgeous – natural linen with pressed flowers embedded in the material, illuminated from behind with soft LEDs.
The first week, people loved them. Like, we had co-working members literally bringing in their friends to watch the walls breathe. The space reported a 40% increase in day pass sales. My mailbox exploded with requests for replicating the same systems in different sites.
Yes, and then the system had a…. I would not quite call it a hiccup. More like an asthmatic panic attack. One of the motors stopped at the wrong spot and instead of gentle, soothing movements, the walls began to erratically pulse. Rapid, stress-inducing expansion, and jerky, awkward pauses. One part of the wall would bulge out while the rest remained deflated. The result was a complete and instantaneous shift from ‘calm’ to ‘potentially violent’.“It’s freaking people out,” Tomas, the space manager, told me. “Kayla says it triggers her anxiety, and two members asked if the building was having structural issues. One guy was convinced we had rats living inside the walls.”
We shut it down and replaced it with static botanical installations—beautiful, but definitely not the innovative merger of tech and nature I’d envisioned. Now I keep the control unit on my desk as a paperweight and lesson in humility.
But here’s the thing, these failures have not steered me off course when it comes to the addition of technology and biophilic design. If anything, it only further fuels my determination to succeed because the end results of a balanced approach are phenomenal.
Consider the latest project for the new student wellness center at Lewis & Clark College, where we installed what we’re dubbing a “responsive landscape,” plantings that react, albeit subtly, to noise levels and the number of occupants in the room. When the center is busy and loud, moisture misters activate, increasing humidity and creating a light sensory buffer. In quieter moments, soft amber lighting accentuates different plants. Unlike traditional methods, the technology seeks not to replicate nature to control it, but to allow nature to respond to human presence dynamically as ecosystems outdoors do.
“Students are actually lowering their voices without being asked,” C h en said, reporting as the center’s director. “They seem to have an instinctive understanding that their actions impact the world around them. It is causing this marvelous feedback loop of social consideration.”
We are still fine-tuning the system—tension and excitement are still being distinguished as sensors are receiving some of the stress— but it is clear that the greatest integration of tech and nature is learned from nature: integrating different systems does not control the elements; it enables dialogues.
Mia, my assistant, noticed this after observing me struggle with the programming of a similar installation. “You try to impose perfect algorithms on everything,” she said. “In case you did not realize, everything in nature is not algorithmic. It responds. Adapts. Perhaps the approach should be more… collaborative? Less director, more translator?”
Of course, she was right. The most successful biophilic technologies do not try to impose borders of digital accuracy on nature’s systems—there is genuine effort to foster interfaces that bridge two dramatically different worlds. Instead of dictators, they act like digital translators.
I have been observing this philosophy with success in more granular assignments as well. My client, Jason, set up a simple moisture sensor system for his home plant collection that does not water anything. Instead, it provides gentle reminders with specific instructions such as, “Your Calathea in the bedroom is getting dry,” or “The fern in your bathroom would appreciate a mist.” The technology aids in maintaining his relationship with the plants instead of replacing it due to automation.
“It’s changed how I see them,” he told me during my last visit when I went to aid him with repotting a particularly large Monstera. “They’re not just decorations anymore. The app actually helped me start paying better attention to subtle changes I wouldn’t have noticed before. Now, I can tell when my Pothos is getting too much sun even before the app says anything.”
The intersection of biophilic tech is most exciting to me—tools that enhance our relationship with the elements around us rather enabling technology to automate them into non-existence.
I’m collaborating in a rather small team of programmers and botanists (odd blend, I know) to work on a project we are calling “plant language translation.” The system “interprets”“ plant stimuli by monitoring changes in electric signals, moisture content, and growth patterns. Not in some sci-fi “the plants are talking to us” manner, but rather as additional information that enables people to make sense of non-human entities that coexist with them.
Early prototypes do give some promise, even if at times laughable in their interpretations. The one that my friends and I still can’t get over is the stressed out jade plant that the system read as “MOVING ME NEXT TO THE HEATING VENT WAS A TERRIBLE DECISION AND I QUESTION ALL YOUR LIFE CHOICES.” The algorithm needs refinement, obviously, though the concept is solid.
In evaluating all these experiments—whether failures or successes—my focus became clear: the ultimate biophilic design is not about merging nature and technology, but rather integrating the two systems in a way where both are in dialogue with one another. Sometimes, nature needs technology to put a break and let it perform its job. Other times, natural systems need some degree of technological support to flourish in our highly unnatural constructed settings.
To find that balance takes a whole lot of consideration from people like me. I have come to terms that regardless of my education and experience, I am in fact grasping the dialect of this connection. Each overrun executive desk and each infested with life breathing wall shows me something new in refraining from all aspects, in considering both systems and their needs as well as limitations.
Speaking of Marco and his formerly submerged office, we ended up redesigning the entire space using an approach that was a lot simpler. As for the living wall, it was taken out with a modular system that can be maintained manually, but we did keep moisture sensors as a primary alert system, albeit with triple redundancies. We incorporated wood features, and the staff were able to activate lighting which illuminate when the nature connection is activated.
“It’s not so much Trekking in the stars but rather, hmmm, a cabin in the woods?” Marco voiced during the reveal. “But that is better. People are interacting with it more because they engage as opposed to just reside beside it.”
That kind of engagement is what I’m tackling now in all my ecotone integrations. How do we apply technology to not cut people off from caregiving, but to offer them an invitation to deeper connection?n
I don’t have complete answers as of now. Just a mounting set of lessons, a few delightful triumphs, and the infrequent marvelously insightful failure. Oh, and a couple of surge protectors. I do not design any system without at least two surge protectors now. Some lessons need only to be learned once, even in the perpetually changing landscape of biophilic technology.
If you are looking for me, I will be at monitoring the credit union downtown that has the new responsive moss installation… from a distance. With a stash of fluffy towels just in case, plain promo wipes within hand reach.
