DESIGN OUTCOME
Our design concept, Eternal Beauty, has 3 elements and utilizes the glasshouse concept outside and inside the Chelsea Physic Garden (CPG) to address an awareness and navigational issue. It raises awareness of different plants’ seasonality by freezing a specific stage for display all-year round while improving the navigation experience of the medicinal plant collection.
The idea of preserving the plants is to attract people through its beauty and to create opportunities for shareable content, which could eventually produce a collective, digital archive that can be co-created on platforms like Instagram.
Garden Exterior: Wall
The mini glasshouse displays provide people with a glimpse into what the garden has to offer without disrupting the peacefulness within the garden, which a hole may create. They make the garden wall more ‘Instagrammable’, which helps attract new visitors, especially when implemented at the entrance facing Royal Hospital Road.
This was inspired by the glasshouses inside the garden which attract many people like Yuhan and I to their see-through structures. The plants used inside the display could also be constructed, enlarged versions to draw more attention.
Garden Interior #1: Resin Map
This resin map can help improve the navigation experience of the medicinal plant collection by helping people learn about and identify plants even if they currently cannot see them physically.
It also categorizes specific areas so people get a clear overview of the plants that can be found in certain areas. We used resin as a prototype to test how the map could use translucent materials and fillings to make it transparent.
Garden Interior #2: Mini Glasshouses
The mini glasshouses have the same concept as the resin map. Plants are preserved at a select season so that visitors can see what they look like in its ‘future’ or ‘past’ form, even if they aren’t currently in season.
The CPG’s gift shop already sells spheres containing flowers like this so there is a sense of consistency and the implementation is not as daunting. These mini glasshouses can take various forms or shapes but we chose to prototype a cubical and spherical shape with the resources we had.