Abstract
Office plants are ubiquitous in urban workplaces, yet they are often treated as disposable decoration rather than living co-inhabitants. This paper examines how interaction design can reconfigure this cultural framing. Using a research-through-design approach that combines interviews, the creation of an aesthetic biofeedback artefact, and a longitudinal deployment, we explore how plant vitality, expressed through light and sound, shapes everyday encounters between employees and plants. Rather than improving maintenance efficiency, the artefact functions as a relational probe. Participants described empathy, comfort, and companionship, alongside guilt, pressure, and resistance when the plant’s expressions demanded attention. These tensions show how care for nonhuman beings emerges through sensory attunement, workplace rhythms, and ongoing ethical negotiation. We contribute to more-than-human design by demonstrating how aesthetic biofeedback shifts plants from background decoration to perceptible co-presence and by identifying relational mechanisms through which care and responsibility are enacted in workplace settings.
Keywords
More than human design; Care and responsibility; Relational artefacts; Aesthetic biofeedback; Workplace ecologies
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2258
Citation
Meng, Y., Liu, B., Li, S., and Huang, X. (2026) From Decoration to Co-Presence: Reconfiguring Human–Plant Relations in Urban Workplaces Through Aesthetic Bio-Feedback, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2258
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
From Decoration to Co-Presence: Reconfiguring Human–Plant Relations in Urban Workplaces Through Aesthetic Bio-Feedback
Office plants are ubiquitous in urban workplaces, yet they are often treated as disposable decoration rather than living co-inhabitants. This paper examines how interaction design can reconfigure this cultural framing. Using a research-through-design approach that combines interviews, the creation of an aesthetic biofeedback artefact, and a longitudinal deployment, we explore how plant vitality, expressed through light and sound, shapes everyday encounters between employees and plants. Rather than improving maintenance efficiency, the artefact functions as a relational probe. Participants described empathy, comfort, and companionship, alongside guilt, pressure, and resistance when the plant’s expressions demanded attention. These tensions show how care for nonhuman beings emerges through sensory attunement, workplace rhythms, and ongoing ethical negotiation. We contribute to more-than-human design by demonstrating how aesthetic biofeedback shifts plants from background decoration to perceptible co-presence and by identifying relational mechanisms through which care and responsibility are enacted in workplace settings.