Pete Foster
Client Strategy Director
The problem
We filled our new office with plants. Loads of them. Big leafy ones, small spiky ones and a few that we can’t quite identify anymore. It looked great - for about a week. Then came the realisation that someone actually had to look after them.
At first, we did what any sensible team would do. We gave everyone their own plant and told them to remember to water it. That worked for approximately three days before the first dragon plant started to droop.
Our Paula took charge and began sending polite-but-firm Slack reminders. That helped for another week. But Paula has far more important things to do than micromanage ferns.
So, we did what any self-respecting digital agency does when faced with a small, slightly ridiculous problem. We built a solution.
The idea
Evergreener started as a lunchtime thought experiment: what if our plants could remind us themselves? We wanted a way to keep track of every plant - who owned it, where it lived, how healthy it was and when it last had a drink. No guilt trips, no confusion, no wilting wax plants.
The result was a prototype dashboard and assistant we nicknamed Evergreener. It keeps an inventory of all our plants, their owners and their current condition. It sends gentle Slack nudges to whoever’s responsible when it’s time for a top-up.
Building it (quickly)
We used Figma Make to whip up a prototype UI in quick time. The dashboard gives a snapshot of every plant’s health, ownership and location in the office. It’s clean, colourful and just a little bit smug about its own existence.
Right now, we manually set the watering schedule for each plant variety, altering it for the humidity in the office. It’s simple but a bit clunky. Our next goal is to improve this process with our first real attempt at connecting hardware to our software.
What’s next
Next on the list? Integrating Wi-Fi-enabled moisture monitors so the dashboard can pull live data from the plants themselves. Once that’s working, the Slack reminders will trigger automatically the moment a plant’s soil gets too dry.
And because we can’t resist turning everything into a friendly competition, we’re also planning a reward system for the healthiest plants. Points for great moisture levels, overall plant health, and maybe even an annual Golden Watering Can award.
Evergreener is still in its early stages, but it’s already given us a glimpse of what’s possible when curiosity meets a criminally under watered cheese plant.
Stay tuned. Our plants certainly are.