Spirit Plant

Spirit Plant introduces visitors to Poland’s cultural relationship with herbs often used for healing and rituals.

Visitors co-create digital “spirit plants” through interactive totems, choosing plant features tied to beliefs, personal values, and Polish traditions.

These parameters are translated into generative forms, drawing from botanical morphology and folk symbolism, and projected into a mystical, collaborative garden.

At the Pavilion’s exit, Generations invites reflection. Here, the spirit plants live on, forming a collective meadow that evolves with every visitor’s contribution. As new plants appear, older ones gracefully fade, creating a sense of temporal continuity and shared authorship.

This living archive, accompanied by soundscape composed by Michał Zygmunt, embodies the balance of past and future, nature and innovation—a vibrant expression of Poland’s cultural memory and forward-thinking spirit, where collective imagination becomes a force for shaping the future.

We have researched plants and trees characteristic of the polish tradition and find their associated meaning in order to design a simple, personal and playful questionnaire.

Each and every one of the 20 plant parts was designed procedurally in Nodes to be then exported, optimised and combined.This modular approach allows for large variety even within one plant species.

Variable Nature - algorithmic recreations of real world plant species

We have developed a performant wind-like simulation to bring these original plants to life when seen individually, in pair or as part of a meadow.

Spirit Plant

A total of 14 screens were mounted on hand woven baskets to serve as the primary interface for creating Spirit Plants.

In order to choose their plant Structure, Leaves, Flower and Aura, visitors were presented with cards to reveal: each card links a feature to a specific plant part.

By choosing one or the other and thanks to user session randomness in our algorithm, the interaction allowed for the creation of truly unique plants.

Each totem plant state was echoed in real-time on fabric projections for the rest of the crowd to get a dynamic overview while they wait their turn.

Generations

Concluding the Pavilion's visit, the "Generations" installation is a 9 by 3 meters projection that wraps up the Spirit Plant creation experience.

By scanning a QR code, people who created a Spirit Plant on totems get a chance to make their own plant grow and highlight it as part of a meadow. It serves as a collective memory of everybody's individual experiences and symbolises interpersonal solidarity brought together by science and innovation.

From opening to closing, the Poland Pavilion sees an uninterrupted flow of visitors with thousands of unique Spirit Plants created every day.

We created a website that allows each Spirit Plant creator to retrieve their plant design and features, saving it as a image and sharing it on social media. This digital souvenir helped visitors bring a piece of the exhibition home with them and distill Spirit Plant outside the Expo space.

The Spirit Plant have also been used on Polish stamps and Expo merch.

Rooted in the Osaka Expo 2025 theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” the Spirit Plant and Generations installations reflect a Polish dialogue between nature, culture, and technology.