Digital Storytelling with Plants, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel

Everyone has a relationship to plants even if they don’t know it: Memories of flowers in a grandfather’s garden, what an aunt cooked for a family feast, or kicking through leaves in autumn. Plants are the basis for life on earth, for oxygen production and daily food consumption. The history of plant usage through systems thinking is an integral theme in Ethnobotany, which today has a role to play in connecting people with their plant history. Unfortunately, interest in scientific knowledge about plants and their benefits for humankind among the public has declined in recent years resulting in “plant blindness – we do not know plants, we do not perceive them”. This project used the knowledge and skills of scientists and gardeners at the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich, artists, and digital and pedagogical experts to co-create contemporary stories about plants and our human relationship to them, with participants from different cultural backgrounds, thus enhancing plant knowledge. We engaged young people through workshops with scientists, artists and storytellers and nurtured their stories about plants. We incorporated key plant research findings and latest digital media to produce “plant stories” for social media.

The project team designed four different workshops (W) in combination with embodiment (W1), coding (W2), art (W3), and AI (W4). Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco and Selina Daphne Knöpfli developed Workshop 1/Foxtrail. In this half-day workshop, the participants embark on a discovery tour of plants by imagining their hidden powers: Plants have developed fascinating strategies to survive in their environment. To experience these firsthand, the participants slip into the role of a researcher, an artist, or a bird. During a fox trail through the Botanical Garden Zürich, they immersed themselves in the unknown powers of plants and explored them with photos, videos, and other technologies. In a kind of role-playing game, they transformed their experiences into a digital story. With step-by-step instructions, thry designed, shot, and edited their own video. They could share it with their friends via the Instagram channel of the Botanical Garden.

The project evaluation summarized their findings, among others, in guidelines for the social media strategy of the Botanical Garden: Digitale Geschichten erzählen mit Pflanzen. Praktische Empfehlungen fürFilmproduktionen mit Kindern und Jugendlichen in der Natur. Ed. by ManuelaDahinden, Yvonne Steinbach, Leah Spirk, Yvonne Volkart, Eveline Hipeli, Bernadette Spieler,Caroline Weckerle (2026). Botanischer Garten der Universität Zürich.

Botanical GardenUZH

Workshop 1/Foxtrail

SNSF Data Portal

Open-Access-Guidelines