The Talking Tree wins iF Gold

Agency for Nature’s Talking Tree has picked up another one. This time it's an iF Design Award, and not just any: a Gold, in the Interior Architecture and Installations categories, putting it among the standout pieces of design work recognised by iF this year.

For anyone who missed it the first time round, the Talking Tree is an Agency for Nature campaign developed with Droga5. It gives living trees a voice, wiring mature trees up to sensors and feeding that live data into an AI model so people can hold a real, spoken conversation with them. It’s  the newest intelligence, AI, in service of the oldest intelligence, nature. Over its first outings in London, Austin and Dublin, people spent more than 80 hours in conversation with the trees, and the campaign made news in India, US and Vietnam, generating over 30 million impressions with no media spend.

What's nice about this particular award is what it says about the essence of the project. Columbia University's Digital Dozen honoured the Talking Tree as a breakthrough in storytelling. iF has recognised it as design, as something built. That feels true to us, because  the Talking Tree isn't really an object you look at. Rather, it's a set of conditions for an encounter: the sensors, the model, the tree, the person standing in front of it not quite sure what to say. The design work was in making that moment possible, then stepping back, and seeing what happened. 

Underneath the awards, the project has thrown up a question that still grips us: if nature can hold up its side of a conversation, even a mediated and imperfect one, does it stay the subject of our stories, or does it start to become an author of them?

Ally Kingston went deeper on all of this earlier in the year, on what the Talking Tree is teaching us about giving nature a voice. It's worth your time.