In 1863, Charles Darwin spent a few months unwell. Confined to his bed, he began to carefully observe the cucumber plants in his room. He took note of their movements as they explored the air looking for ways to climb, and he was enthralled and excited at their seemingly "spontaneous" behaviour. Upon recovery, he reached out to his colleague who informed him that the movement of plants was already a well-studied phenomenon. Not to be deterred, Darwin developed a technique for measuring the movement of plants in a painstakingly meticulous way. It involved taking precise measurements using a specially designed apparatus. He would place a plant between a sheet of paper and a glass plate; then, he would mark a reference point on the paper and attach a thin wire to a stem or leaf. Darwin continued to make recordings periodically by lining up the wire with the reference point and marking its position. He then drew the resulting data visualisations on paper, portraying three dimensions in a two-dimensional plane. Darwin also used photographs and illustrations to record how the plants responded to external stimuli. 

Charles Darwin designed an apparatus for recording the movement of plants. Photograph is of Averrhoa, a genus of trees in the family Oxalidaceae.

Though the topic had already been explored in contemporaneous literature, it had never been measured, documented, reported, and visualised in such minute detail. Darwin's resulting book, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), published by D. Appleton and Company, represents a significant part of Darwin’s contributions to botanical sciences. Through his diagrams and drawings Darwin demonstrated the role that careful data collection could play in the study of living beings and their environments. Darwin’s data visualisations helped make the movement of plants visible, both on the page and in the mind’s eye of his readers. 

Pages from the first edition of Darwin’s text showing visualisations of recorded plant movement data, and illustration of leaf movement in Desmodium Gyrans. Darwin, Charles, and Francis Darwin. Pages 25 and 358. “The power of movement in plants.” (1883). Reproduced with permission from John van Wyhe ed. 2002-. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

In 1957, with the launching of Russia’s first satellite, the power to locate a receiving device anywhere on the plant was born. The first satellite location system (called Transit) provided data for military, commerce, and science for forty years. Three decades later, in 1996, with development of Global Positioning System (GPS), researchers were able to distribute handheld devices to participants who were then tracked as they moved about during their daily routines. Researchers used this data to study urban environments. For example, they used GPS data to study how people use and visit parks. They identified the frequently used footpaths and travel routes, quantifying the parks’ users’ experience of nature. In 2007, when the iPhone integrated GPS into a smartphone, the quantity of location data available for research, exploded. Suddenly, every individual human with a phone became a living urban sensor. This kind of data had been used before, but never had it been produced in such quantities. 

Screenshots of data visualisation showing GPS data from smartphones to visualise the movement of people in and around buildings. Rout, A., & Willett, W. (2021). (Big) data in urban design practice: Supporting high-level design tasks using a visualization of human movement data from smartphones. Urban Informatics and Future Cities, 301-318.

From Plant Movement to Human Movement 

Though functioning at a completely different scale, both GPS images and Darwin’s drawings can help scientists and designers understand intricate relationships between environments and living things. Maps visualising GPS data have similar visual qualities to Darwin’s plant movement graphics. Essentially, they are a sequence of spatial locations connected by lines. When seen as a pattern, they reveal relationships between movement and environments.

Today, indoor spaces are rich with data that capture the traces, conditions and behaviors of people and plants. In commercial buildings, sensors are used to adjust window shading devices or to make micro-adjustments to indoor climates. Plant health is monitored using phone apps or water-sensing devices. At home, we use smartphones to turn on our lights, or to scan a houseplant to check ways to care for it. This kind of “living data” helps us both understand and improve life in buildings.

 GPS data was a boon for urban analytics research, but new approaches are needed for architecture and design. Buildings are different than cities. They are custom-designed products, situated within individual contexts and experiences; interior spaces are delineated micro-ecosystems where living and non-living entities interact, forming connections that extend beyond the building's walls. 

In Living Data Studies, we work on making these micro-ecosystems in architecture visible and understandable. Like Darwin, the topic has been studied before, but the investigations need to become more precise, comprehensive and visual. Darwin’s plants had many invisible environmental factors that influence their growth (light, temperature, gravity, touch), and his studies helped biologists “see” the invisible forces animating them. In Living Data Studies, we have a parallel objective: to help designers “see” otherwise invisible relationships between people and buildings. Just as Darwin studied a plant’s responses to light and climate, we seek a deeper understanding of how and why people respond to atmospheric qualities. Such insights will help future architects learn how people are connected to their surroundings, including the plants we live with. The research will also provide designers with data techniques to help navigate an era of sensing, data-driven computation, and environmental change.