Given how embedded technological systems are into our everyday lives, it is of utmost importance that we design our interfaces well; the more we use them, and the more we orient around them to be productive, the more they become us, and we become them. Designing them “well” doesn’t just mean that they are easy to use—good design also takes into account the ramifications each interaction may have on our cognition, even years down the line.
David Krakauer’s notion of competitive and complementary “cognitive artifacts” highlights that the way we use and develop technology can either increase or diminish our capacity to function as individuals in the world around us. For example, abacuses may leverage our visual cortex to do more abstract, mathematical functions, but GPS systems may atrophy our ability to read maps and navigate physical environments.
In the same vein, data is a vehicle for information and sense-making. In a world overflowing with it, much of it remains intangible and incomprehensible—often abstracted into numbers that feel disconnected from the physical reality they are supposed to represent. Statistics about food production, fiscal circulation, or mortality rates become mere digits on a screen, their significance obscured behind raw numerics. There is an increasing need for “embodied data”—data that is anchored in physical space, fostering intuition and attunement with our lived environments.
Digital Terrarium is a reorientation of how we engage with environmental data, allowing it to be de-abstracted into an experiential, aesthetic, and interactive medium. Rather than reducing information to metrics that vanish into the void, this project creates a visual interface that focuses on how to build an intuitive and relational component to data. It is a practice—both a meditation and one facilitated by technology—that allows one to sense and acknowledge real-time environmental changes while contributing local data to a collective digital ecosystem.
Through the creation and dissemination of this piece, we’d like to explore possibilities of collective nurturing, interconnectedness, and distributed evolution.
A terrarium is a self-contained miniature ecosystem, offering a glimpse into how life can thrive in a controlled yet responsive environment. People create terrariums for various reasons:
Digital Terrarium extends these principles into a networked, digital space, where the cultivation and care of digital creatures mirror the experience of nurturing a physical ecosystem.
The Digital Terrarium is built using Raspberry Pi and various environmental sensors to gather real-time data. These sensors monitor conditions like temperature, barometric pressure, lux (light), and noise levels, providing dynamic inputs that shape the behaviors of the digital life forms.
The project also incorporates Pepper’s Ghost illusion—a simple but effective technique that uses a fishbowl and angled plexiglass to create the illusion of holographic digital creatures cohabiting with the real-world terrarium. This setup creates a seamless augmented reality (AR) experience, where both physical and digital life forms interact in the same space. Instead of viewing the digital ecosystem solely through a screen or as numerical data, users see digital entities floating and moving around a living terrarium, responding to environmental changes in real time.
This hybrid environment allows for a new way of experiencing digital life—not confined to a separate world but existing and evolving as natural extensions of our environment.