Becomes a Dialogue
Integrated Media Design
Speculative Design|Book Design|Object Making|Editorial design
By translating bodily movements that emerge in gardening into verb-like tools, the project demonstrates how care and discipline coexist in the garden, and reveals how tools shape both human behaviour and plant growth.
It traces the continuous cycle between gesture, tool and rule, and proposes a new way of understanding the garden: not as pure nature, but as a language composed of choices and decisions.
How a garden becomes a dialogue
This project originates from my personal experience. As a child, I grew up with a large garden, where I accumulated many intuitive and embodied experiences. As my living environment changed over time, I gradually came to realise that the meaning of the garden became more complex. I began to understand that the garden is not pure nature, but a language shaped by choices and decisions.
This contrast led me to question how gardens are actually constructed, and this personal experience became the starting point of my research.
My methodology is grounded in practice.
Returning to the question “How can dialogue be constructed?”, I explore the possibility of communication through three modes of translation.
Through these translations, a seemingly simple act of planting gradually becomes a dialogue between body, tool, land, and container. The tools developed in this project emerge in a more natural and less predetermined manner, and their indeterminacy reflects my childhood understanding of the garden as a space of freedom.
However, as I continue to give form to these tools, I also become aware that I am inevitably producing rules. This tension leads me to the position I propose: the garden is not a self-operating nature, but a system that functions through rules.
Garden Grammar is a design zine centred on planting practices.
Through the formulation of planting rules, it guides viewers to use gardening tools to establish a dialogue with the land.
At the exhibition site, I constructed a “garden” as a space for audience participation and embodied experience.
Over the four-day exhibition, I observed that when visitors encountered this tool, they often instinctively picked it up and began piercing holes in the soil. This action required little to no explanation or instruction; it appeared to occur almost automatically.
This phenomenon confirms an observation I developed through earlier research and reading: tools possess the ability to activate embodied memory. When people encounter a digging tool, past experiences of digging and touching the soil are reawakened, and the body often responds before conscious thought.
At the exhibition site, I constructed a “garden” as a space for audience participation and embodied experience.
Over the four-day exhibition, I observed that when visitors encountered this tool, they often instinctively picked it up and began piercing holes in the soil. This action required little to no explanation or instruction; it appeared to occur almost automatically.
This phenomenon confirms an observation I developed through earlier research and reading: tools possess the ability to activate embodied memory. When people encounter a digging tool, past experiences of digging and touching the soil are reawakened, and the body often responds before conscious thought.