Mixing Nature with Technology

It's study crunch time and I'm going Analog and Digital simultaneously

Good morning! It’s still early spring here. What are you up to?

Pedicularis densiflora near the top of Mt Tamalpais. Photo by Lorraine Sawicki

I’m in the middle of crunch time for my California Native Plant Society Field Biologist test this Friday! There’s a lot of memorization. A lot of Latin. A lot of illustrations of leaf shapes, flower parts and definitions. There are maps and surveys of where certain species like to grow. It’s all so interesting to me.

I went with my family on a hike at the top of Mt. Tamalpais last Saturday, and saw the little plant also known as “Indian Warrior” but more officially Pedicularis densiflora up at the top here growing right next to a trail constantly filled with people excited to get to the top. The trail was very rocky and I saw many people ill prepared for the extremely rough terrain - but everyone was smiling and it was a short trail.

As I told my friend about all this last weekend, her only question was - “How will this get you get more work?” But she’s from New York City, and whenever we talk she’s in workaholic mode. (Love you!) Sometimes I do things because I want to check off an achievement, add it to my repertoire of knowledge and ultimately add a body of information to my opinions and design work so that I can have inspiration and a nature-based frame of reference.

But more specifically, I am taking interior design and architecture classes and have really started to feel biophilic design. What better way to influence that than with directly and intentionally studying nature.

Technology? Really, right here right now?

Yes, I did decide to create a study guide. I used Claude to help me with memorizing hundreds of plant names and images via a react component that I then customized and hand-fetched photos for myself to use for my educational purposes. I do have enough of a background to make this somewhat trivial and managed within about an hour to create something that I can use on my local laptop environment to essentially have a customized flash card set.

Why did I do this?

Because I don’t have the time to create 500 flash cards on paper. Or draw each plant individually (but that sounds like a beautiful job if I had the chance to get paid for that!) Or photograph each of the plants. That’s more of a bucket list thing than a study guide.

But at the same time I AM writing some of the names down by hand, to cement that hand-to-brain memory relationship.