Plants & Power
Plants & Power is a documentary project by Youp Ferket, Oscar Tomico, Victor Muñoz Sanz, and Katharine Legun, examining how design shapes — and is shaped by — human relationships with plants. The film follows four sites with distinct approaches to cultivating and caring for plant life: a commercial greenhouse, a food forest, a farm field lab, and a community garden.
Plants & Power, documentary project by Youp Ferket, Oscar Tomico, Victor Muñoz Sanz
Across these sites, the project traces how design choices about structure, experimentation, and care produce different forms of kinship between people and plants. A commercial greenhouse optimizes for control and yield; a food forest works with long temporalities and ecological succession; a farm field lab tests new agricultural methods under research conditions; a community garden distributes care and decision-making among its members. Each setting offers a different answer to questions of fragility, resilience, and interdependence, and the film holds these differences in view rather than resolving them into a single position.
The documentary draws on interviews with practitioners working directly with plants and soil. As Tom Lorier, interviewed for the film, puts it: "everything starts with the soil." Linde Langendijk, also featured, adds: "there's no plant you don't need, every plant has its value." These statements frame the project's broader interest in plants as design collaborators rather than passive material, and in the social and spatial arrangements that make different kinds of plant life — and plant care — possible.
Plants & Power was produced as part of the 2026 Design Bridges edition, under the theme Living Environment, with participation from TU Eindhoven.
The project was supported by a 4TU.Design United Probe Funding grant, which enables design researchers to take first steps toward joint projects and prepare experiences for presentation at Dutch Design Week.
The film premieres at Dutch Design Week as part of 4TU.Design United Dialogues 1: Living Environment, on 19 October 2026, 10:00–12:30, at Natlab, Strijp-S, Eindhoven. The session presents seven design research projects on technology and the living environment and is free to attend; registration closes 12 October.