Plants

Because of time constraints an issue was finding a plant that grew fast enough to test our ideas. We also wanted something which we could see a market for. Plants we looked at

+ vines
+ bamboo
+ mushrooms
+ fruit
+ herbs
+ sea sponges
+ rhubarb

We thought if we could control the way in which edible mushrooms grow we could design "designer mushrooms" for high end restaurants. However, we felt that this was very limited market and our ideas could be pushed much further.



We looked at bamboo because of the speed of growth but its toughness and strength would be hard to control.

We looked at controlling the fruit of the plant, rather than the whole plant such as square watermelons. However, this type of thing has already been done.



We also considered sea sponge as a material. For a while this looked promising as they can reassemble themselves once they have been blenderised. We chose not to follow this path for several reasons. Firstly, because we did not want to kill the sponges. Secondly because the process of keeping sponges is very expensive and lastly we discovered that once we removed the constraints on the growth of the sponge it would just expand back to its original form.



When investigating the plants we decided that the root structure was more beautiful and offered more options in form and structure. We then started to look into controlling roots through molds. Our ideas were reinforced by looking at root bound plants where the roots were dense enough to hold the shape of the pot that contained it.