Approach

For this project, I aimed to focus on communicating emotion through the simplest of ambient displays - a simple RGB Led. It is an attempt to personify a plant without making the experience too obstrusive. It was also a technical challenge to be able to make the feelings of the plant seem intuitive to a human. It was also challenging to make the plant seem to 'breathe' without being distracting.

While the form of the device was not a requirement, I chose to explore it since I felt that it was important to communicate the idea appropriately. i.e. it was important to make the plant seem to communicate naturally.

In order to make the 'breath' animation seem more natural, I used a sine function rather than a straight-line approach. This was then tweaked to add pauses at the apex and trophs. A custom function allowed the timing to be adjusted to iteratively create the 'feel' of a human breathing. A similar approach will be used to create a 'shiver' (with a decreasing aptitude), however, a random brightness sequence was used to create a flicker):

A sine graph