Druidz

A worldwide mobile platform turning 75 million botanical records into an invitation to walk outside and look around.

Several years after Eat the Road, Druidz returned to the same relationship between plants, geographic information and physical exploration, but at a radically different scale. Druidz is a worldwide mobile platform transforming the discovery of wild edible plants into an exploration experience: 75 million botanical occurrences, more than 500,000 recipes and uses, over 100 countries.

I independently designed and developed the complete system: mobile applications, user experience, backend architecture, geospatial infrastructure, initial data acquisition and processing, database architecture, collaborative tools and deployment on Android and iOS.

Rather than presenting this information as a conventional botanical database, Druidz reconnects data with physical movement. Users explore their surroundings, discover plants that may occur around them, access documented uses and recipes, and progressively reveal territories through a scratch map inspired interface. The screen becomes an intermediary between an enormous abstract dataset and the landscape immediately surrounding the user.

In Eat the Road, Vincent crossed a landscape in order to create data. In Druidz, data is used to encourage people to explore landscapes. A contemporary paradox emerges from his work: Can digital information make us pay more attention to the physical world?