Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir's paper “Domestic Cultures of Plant Care: A Moss Terrarium Probe”, was awarded Best Paper at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) 2025. The work was lauded particularly for its originality, methodological rigour and its potential impact on the field of interactive systems.

Here is the paper abstract:

Houseplants are increasingly being used as part of interactive systems that aim to foster pro-environmental concern and awareness of more-than-human life. Yet such interventions rely on conflicting and untested assumptions about how people relate to houseplants. We therefore studied domestic plant care in 11 purposefully sampled households, applying a sensor-equipped moss terrarium as a living ‘thing ethnography’ probe, supplemented with semi-structured interviews.

We find that social and intergenerational cultures of plant care inform people's individual concern and accountability through constituents and mechanisms like gift-giving, signaling, knowledge transfer, or joint practical care.

We identify five domestic cultures of plant care in our sample, each of which frames plants differently and leads to different practical approaches to plant care. We propose design considerations that emphasise enculturation and shared care over individual behaviour change and reframe houseplants from decorative objects into living household members.

You can access the full paper here.

DIS25 took place 05-09 July in Madeira (Portugal). Nirit described the conference experience as very valuable, and enjoyed receiving some very useful feedback about her talk from the audience, making new connections as well as exploring its setting at Madeira Islands.

Link to QMUL News article