A productive week

By Arthur BRICQ November 12, 2019 Discover Roots project

This week was a very productive week for our team, and at the end of it we now know we must (very likely) change our name soon. 

After having dived into the pollinisation problem that we already mentioned several times, we realized it was not best suited for a connected device for different reasons. Among theses, the fact that any devices would be difficult to test, and that dealing with actual animal life isn’t easy. 

In the last 3 weeks, other ideas had came up to us, and we are still investing them. The bird monitoring system have catched our attention and we talked about it quite a lot. Also, plant analysis system looked really interesting. 

For the MS1 preparation presentation (which was a very productive moment with a lot of learning at the end) we did present the plant analysis system. It appeared that it was easier to find insights about this topic, as all of us feel more connected to it. 

Observations (mostly from personal experiences or family experiences) tell us that many ones of us let their plants to die, mostly because they don’t necessarily know how to deal with them. It is true that there exists a very large variety of devices dealing with this issue (and it is why at first we were pretty reluctant to work with this) but we now think that the opportunity space is broader than today’s existing solutions. Indeed, most of the existing devices are fully autonomous and don’t really emphasize the “poetic”  importance that plants can have to us, humans. Also, there are some technologies that are already developed but not available to public (only for professionals). 

As a result of this week, and of this great workshop about presentation and story telling, we now have a stronger confidence into our intuition of going with plants. We will try to investigate how we can look for a “poetic relationship” with plants that’s bigger than simply a “WiFi” connection. 

As many ones of us have already heard, “plants need to be loved”, so we’ll try to get some insight about this and see what we can do starting from this nice sentence. 

And as I mentioned at the beginning of the paper, soon enough we might not be anymore the bee boys !