LA Palms + People
Fall 2019 | Creative Tech Iin collaboration with Tingyi Li
Project Brief
Using the context of Los Angeles City and its surrounding areas, design and prototype a small device that would influence people and conditions in this area in an interesting way. The conditions you consider can be cultural, social-economic, social, political, or some other dimension.
Create a completely self-contained smart device - create an entire project inside a 3D printed enclosure of your own design, with no external wires. This means that it must have its own battery, communicate with the world wirelessly, and all sensors and actuators must be mounted to the device.
Create a completely self-contained smart device - create an entire project inside a 3D printed enclosure of your own design, with no external wires. This means that it must have its own battery, communicate with the world wirelessly, and all sensors and actuators must be mounted to the device.
A person chatting with a palm tree (left), an info page that shows a global map of where people in LA are originally from (right)
Project Description
Palm trees have long been an iconic cultural symbol of Los Angeles, despite the fact that only one species of palm tree (Washington filifera) is native to the area. Many of the palm trees in Los Angeles come from Brazil, Mexico, and Spain.
Palm trees don’t have elaborate root systems, and are are easy to transport. They grow in predictable and consistent ways, which makes them ideal for urban planners and city developers.
While other types of trees are used in cities to help control erosion and provide clean air and shade, palm trees don’t do any of that; their purpose was to help shape Los Angeles’s image and convince people to move there.
One of the things that makes Los Angeles special is its diversity - similar to how Los Angeles’s palm trees come from other parts of the world, so do its inhabitants. By enabling us to ‘communicate’ with these palm trees, this cloud-connected device aims to showcase the diverse and expatriate nature of Los Angeles.
Research + Concept
Rather than designing an Internet Of Things utility device, like an internet-connected appliance or app for the smart home, we were more interested in thinking about representing or communicating a unique component of Los Angeles.
As a California native, palm trees are all too familiar; I never really thought much of them until my collaborator mentioned how she saw them as a cultural symbol of Los Angeles. Given that many people who live in the area come from diverse parts of the world, we thought it would be interesting to use physical computing and IoT protocols to create a way for humans to communicate with palm trees.
Components that make up the palm tree device.
Tools + Technologies
Physical Computing:
ESP32 - Adafruit HUZZAH32, Adafruit FeatherWing OLED, push button, MicroPython, MQTT
Web Technologies:
HTML, CSS, Javascript (Node.js, d3.js), WebSockets, MQTT