2024 - P.I.B(Plant Intelligence Blind)

Due to urban development, the natural topography has changed. Asphalt and concrete covering cities emit heat every night creating a new urban environment that has never existed in nature before. This weather phenomenon, known as urban climate, becomes stronger the larger and more active a city is. Due to city temperature rise, the energy consumption used in maintaining constant temperature inside buildings has also increased. Our project proposes ’PIB’, which counteracts the problems of city temperature rise and reduces excessive energy used in maintaining indoor temperature in an eco-friendly way.

‘PIB’(Plant Intelligence Blind) is an automatic blind attatched to an exterior window of a buildng. Its operation completely relies on Sunlight and Plants making it an Eco-Friendly device which has an energy circulation structure based on plant’s photosynthesis. The key point of ‘PIB’ is that the plants on the panel do not simply represent urban greening, but the plants themselves act as sensors for the blind. This idea and technology to use plants as sensors originnates from ‘Elowan’, a plant robot created by MIT Media Lab. Elowan semi-autonomously travels through places which provied a good amount of sunlight for photosynthesis, depending on the electrical signals sent by the plants.

Just as Elowan controls movement in response to light, each panels of ‘PIB’ can move automatically using ‘Heliotropism’ which is the tendency of a plant’s leaves to grow toward the sunlight. The leave sensors convert sunpath and light quantity information into electric signals which determines the angle of each Plant Panel and the vertical length of the Blind to block sunlight efficiently.
When plants photosynthesize, they produce organic matter which enables plant growth. Organic matter that has not been used in plant growth is discharged through the roots. Bacteria in the soil decompose the discharged organic matter, and electrons are released as by-products in this process. Plant-E’s Energy Converter, which we intend to use, ’Produces Electricity through Living Plants’ by converting these emitted electrons into electricity. This electricity operates the Panel Rotate Motors and the Vertical Travel Motor.