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User Experience:

Garden Variety is a nonlinear experience that encourages exploration and discovery. With Garden Variety, users create a personalized garden without being limited by a prescribed set of possibilities. The flowerbed serves as a creative hub, allowing users to make innumerable arrangements and patterns. It is a garden of infinite variety.
Concept Description:

Variables in nature are interdependent, each organism affecting others in unpredictable and intricate ways. The process of planting a garden, therefore, seemed perfectly suited to explore user interaction with Web-based object-oriented environments. We created the garden using two initial types of objects –plants and tools. Each plant – Daisy, Rose, and Cactus – has a different personality needing different kinds of care from users. Users nurture the plants by dragging the tools – Watering Can, Fertilizer and Bug Spray – over plants. With proper care, the plants flourish and bloom, but plants that are left unattended will wither and die.
In addition to the two main types of objects, we incorporated several random events that unpredictably appear and encourage users to watch over their gardens with more vigilance. If plants are not sprayed with bug spray, grasshoppers may attack them. However, users should spray cautiously because over spraying discourages visits by more helpful bugs like butterflies and bees, who decorate and pollinate the garden.
Implementation Specifics:

Garden Variety is object oriented. Each plant type is a child object of a parent plant that has three main properties – water preference, pesticide preference, and fertilizer preference. Each class of children – Cactus, Daisy, and Rose – has a unique combination of characteristics set by the author. In addition, the tools and random events carry with them unique properties that, when intersected with a plant or plants, trigger the next event in the garden. The programming and delivery environment was developed in Director. The visible interface consists of Flash movies imported into Director that are controlled using a combination of Lingo and ActionScript. User interactions trigger functions that affect the rate at which the animations play and determine whether the objects they represent will be affected by random events.


Future Directions:

Because the code was written with an emphasis on autonomous objects with definite behaviors, the set of tools and types of plants included in the garden are broadly and easily expandable. Future expansion includes more complex behaviors to allow users to learn more deeply about the effects of human interaction with nature. These might include weather conditions that users must respond to, intrusion by unplanned weeds, or the ability for users to pick flowers for further creative experimentation, such as making arrangements or sending a custom bouquet via email.

Enter the Garden itself, or

Select a screenshot to learn more about the Garden.
plant rows see bees butterflies visit grasshoppers tractor clears
download a pdf of the commented lingo scripts