One-Sentence Essence
What is this project really about?
A living experiment in shared plant stewardship that explores care, ownership, and continuity in nomadic human lives.
Why This Project Exists
The core question, tension, or intention.
This project exists to address a quiet but pervasive tension: how to practice care, responsibility, and rootedness when one’s life is structurally mobile. It asks whether stewardship can replace ownership, and whether relationships—with plants, with others, with place—can be designed as temporary yet meaningful, rather than permanent. At its core, the project investigates how care circulates when stability is no longer assumed.
Why Sanctuary
What makes your project suitable for sanctuary?
Sanctuary provides a temporal and relational container that mirrors the project’s inquiry: slow attention, shared presence, and non-instrumental value.
This project treats Sanctuary as a design research environment—a social and technological experimental lab where everyday interactions can be observed and reflected upon in context. The Sanctuary Airbnb, largely neutral and low in predefined identity, offers a suitable setting for introducing a minimal intervention and studying its effects over time.
The project is guided by a small set of working hypotheses:
Relational and reflective hypothesis
Introducing a living plant into a shared space may create alternative modes of interaction that extend beyond human-to-human dynamics. For participants—many of whom come from technical, work-focused backgrounds—the plant functions as a mediating object through which care, projection, restraint, and attention can be expressed indirectly. The project explores whether this form of engagement supports self-inquiry and reflection without requiring explicit emotional disclosure.
Work–wellness hypothesis
Situated within Sanctuary’s rhythm of intense work and communal living, the project examines whether plant stewardship can offer a different way of occupying time outside of task-oriented productivity. This includes moments of care, observation, and pause that sit between work and leisure, contributing to balance rather than output.
Continuity hypothesis
Beyond the immediate Sanctuary context, the project tests whether care can persist across transitions. The second stage of Nomadic Plants explores the possibility of rehousing the plants with other nomadic participants, extending their life beyond the residency and creating a chain of stewardship. This stage investigates whether continuity—often assumed to require stability—can instead be designed through intentional handover, documentation, and shared responsibility.