What is a Nature Room?

[chrishobcroft]

During meetings so far, we have all been excited about the idea of using the concept of "nature" to help hackers to gain inspiration from different sources.

This issue is designed to start a discussion about what would happen in a nature room.

Some ideas that have been thrown around are:

• Plants / Flowers

  • Growing something specific for ETHBerlin
  • Moving all the plants near the room into the room
  • Spending some budget on buying more plants
  • Bringing some grass into the room for people to sit on (?)

• Visuals / Projection

  • Video / images projected onto walls to evoke some natural connection
  • Stars projected onto ceiling

• Sound

  • Playing sounds of nature
  • Birds, Ocean, Frogs, Crickets, Wind rushing through trees

• Water Feature

  • Possibly impractical, but it is the source of life
  • Maybe something about directing hackers to water plants?

There is something which feels a bit crazy about having a nature room indoors, but I'm excited to see what things people come up with!

Please add comments!

[aogunwole]

Adding on to the discussion, a few points that were also mentioned:

• Water Feature
  We also discussed a rain stick as a substitute for having a dedicated water feature given the space needed. This can also be an additive sound element.

I propose suggesting some concepts around segmenting out nature themes by day/time of day that are contrasting. For example:

Sept 7th
Theme: Jungle/Rainforest and Mountain

Sept 8th
Theme: Desert and Ocean

Sept 9th
Theme: Forest and Lake

We can then try to build experiences either through live plants, sounds, projects and art that would reinforce these themes. This would also give us clarity in how we select artists or projects to work with as they could be chosen by theme.

I think we should also start thinking about budget for the room. I think the biggest budget items will be renting any sound or video features and any supporting artists. Getting any plants themselves will be fairly reasonable. I'd hope we can grow something, rent out equipment, and provide live plants in ~850 - 1,000 EUR.

What do you all think?

[mariapaulafn]

IMO, we should go for Brandenburg everything: animals, forests, lakes. etc.
We could try integrating here a screen with a decentraland LAND plot as a VR element to combine both nature and technology.

[mariapaulafn]

the budget is fine for this @aogunwole

[aogunwole]

Connecting with Petra now to finalize all costs for nature room this week/latest early next week

[chrishobcroft]

Hey @aogunwole thanks for this, and welcome back.

For information, Petra isn't involved in the Nature Room as we couldn't find a feasible way to include her in the budget.

[aogunwole]

@chrishobcroft Thanks for the heads up. She had responded earlier with some follow ups on the Nature Room but I'll run with it moving forward from now on then.