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As biodiversity loss intensifies in the Anthropocene or the time in which humans have heavily impacted the environment, climate, and ecosystem, I explore a future scenario marked by extreme biodiversity collapse and the extinction of pollinators. As the latter disappears, who or what will take pollinators' place to sustain our planet?
Inspired by the parasitic growth form of Strangler Fig trees (Aumeeruddy-Thomas and Hossaert-McKey, 2024), I use speculative design to ask: how far might humans go to restore biodiversity to the environment? Could we envision a future where humans form parasitic relationships with plants, evolving into a new pollinator species? Through this exploration, I seek to use speculative design and a speculative artifact as a tool for imagining non-human-centric futures.
A garment and tattoo embedded with plant seeds that feed on human sweat and bodily fluids to grow. As the plant matures, it gradually alters the wearer’s posture and constricts movement, forcing the human body to conform to its growth. When the plant reaches its pollination stage, everyday human movements and social interactions, such as hugging, naturally disperse pollen to other plants, promoting biodiversity.
I fabricated a seed-embedded wool garment and a temporary tattoo as early prototypes for exploring more-than-human entanglements in a speculative future. These designs were inspired by the question: what if plants could use humans the way we use them? Throughout history, humans have imposed control over nature—organizing forests into grids, breeding plants for optimized yield, and shaping entire ecologies for extractive purposes. As James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State (1998), “The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks… to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of lookalike conscripts.” This quote illustrates how trees were reorganized for ease of control—treated less like living beings and more like units in a spreadsheet. Forests were designed hierarchically to serve human goals, with little regard for ecological complexity.
Rather than perpetuating this one-sided control, my speculative design project imagines a reversal: what if plants began to exploit us? In this future, humans become resources for plants. Sweat, blood, and bodily fluids are no longer waste or byproducts—they become nutrients that fuel plant growth. This scenario challenges us to rethink our roles in ecological systems, questioning the boundaries between care, parasitism, and symbiosis.The seed-embedded tattoo, for instance, visualizes the intimacy of this relationship—moss and seeds attempting to grow on human skin.
Although biologically implausible with current materials, the prototype functions as a thought experiment about contact, permeability, and agency. The wool garment acts as a potential medium for sustaining plant growth using heat and moisture from the body. Though not tested with users yet, future iterations could experiment with growing conditions, exploring wool’s potential as a host material.
As biodiversity loss intensifies in the Anthropocene and pollinators face extinction, this work asks: what if humans evolved into a new pollinator species? Could our social behaviors—embraces, brushing past others, sharing space—be co-opted to disperse pollen and support non-human reproduction?This project is inspired by the parasitic growth form of strangler fig trees (Aumeeruddy-Thomas & Hossaert-McKey, 2024), which enwrap and eventually subsume their host. Through speculative design, I explore how such entanglements might manifest if humans were no longer in control—but entangled, constrained, and ultimately transformed by the ecological systems we once dominated.
The temporary tattoo is an early prototype to visualize the non-human (seeds and moss) making direct contact on the skin to highlight the parasitic, symbiotic relationship between plants and humans. Due to the adhesive on temporary tattoo paper, the seeds and moss are unable to be supplied moisture and light effectively to healthily grow. The parasitic like temporary tattoo is not a suitable environment for growing plants. Thus, Seeds and moss are currently unable to grow on skin.
The wool garment is able to act as a host for seeds such as garden cress and chia; however, the garment was not durable enough to be worn after multi-week watering. A thicker wool-felt material could be an alternative approach in the future.
In the future, I would like to re-fabricate the garment and experiment with growing seeds on wool under varying conditions such as wool thickness, consistent temperature, more humidity, and wool shapes. I would like to also explore wool as a material for other more-than-human interactions. Post-fabricating, I would like to perform a user studies to receive feedback and thoughts on this speculative future. Additionally, I would like to build on this world through a more realistic plant-skin prototypes and artifacts such as posters and advertisements.
