Speaker Spotlight

What inspired the creation of Planet Laboratory? 

I’ve been working with bees for over twelve years, so I’m constantly thinking about pollinator pathways, citizen science and how we can design landscapes that help nature thrive. That interest in biodiversity and systems thinking naturally led me to explore how technology might help us see and understand these connections. 

Planet Laboratory began during a project with Colchester and Ipswich Museums, supported by the Earth and Space Foundation, where I explored how satellites monitor biodiversity from space. I ran workshops with Suffolk Young Carers, where we used recycled materials and carpet tiles to design mosaic landscapes on the floor, then captured them using drones and LiDAR, technologies that mirror how satellites scan the Earth. Those experiments inspired me to create our own ‘satellite simulator,’ a system that can detect biodiversity using colour and pattern recognition, but in an accessible, playful way. 

The game’s camera works a lot like real Earth observation satellites, it scans for colour and coverage to calculate habitat balance, just as scientists map land use and track ecosystem change. I wanted to keep those scientific principles true, but translate them into something hands-on and collaborative. 

As a sound artist, I also wanted to explore how landscapes sound as they come to life. Sound is a powerful form of environmental sensing, it tells us when an ecosystem is thriving or struggling. In Planet Laboratory, as you add more woodland, you hear birds and flowing leaves; more meadow, and the hum of bees grows. The soundscape evolves with every choice, turning data into something sensory and alive, a world you can both see and hear flourish. 

Can you walk us through the process of designing the interactive mosaic of habitats? 

I decided early on to work with a modular hexagonal system, it was much easier to build collaboratively than irregular shapes, and it allowed people to piece together their landscapes seamlessly as a team. Each hex tile represents one of six key habitats,  woodland, wetland, meadow, hedgerow, mosaic farmland, and coastal marshland, all fundamental to life in East Anglia. I would have loved to include more, but I had to balance creative ambition with technical reliability, making sure the camera could accurately detect different colours and textures. 

Each tile has its own distinct material and feel, woodland made from real moss, meadow from yellow felt, coastal marshland from a purple furry fabric. Designing something that needed to be both visually recognisable and machine-readable was a real challenge, it became a process of research and prototyping to find the sweet spot between art, ecology, and technology. 

Now that the satellite system is working reliably, I’m excited to keep evolving the materials and making the habitats even more expressive. The next stage is to push the tiles further, to make them not only technically functional, but also more sculptural and imaginative as artworks in their own right. 

What role did collaboration play in shaping the final experience? 

Collaboration is at the heart of almost everything I do, though for Planet Laboratory, I approached it a little differently. With this project, I wanted to lead the first realisation myself, treating it as an artwork first before opening it up to wider scientific dialogue. Even though the technology behind it is quite complex, I’ve worked to make it accessible and modular enough that I could prototype, test, and run it independently. 

That said, collaboration still surrounds the work. I’m currently Artist-in-Residence in the Maori Lab at the University of Cambridge, where I’m developing another project, Hive Heroes. There, I work closely with scientists to communicate research and create two-way knowledge exchange between the lab and the public. It’s been an incredible experience, and it continues to shape how I think about art, science, and participation. 

For Planet Laboratory, I’ve had invaluable help from a small creative team, Tom Pilgrim, Doug Hunter, Adonai Chinyama and Nat Booth, who have supported the technical and practical realisation of the piece. The next step will be to open up the project to interdisciplinary collaboration, with scientists, planners, and conservation groups who might use it for public engagement or participatory modelling. 

I’d love for Planet Laboratory to evolve into a tool that not only inspires creativity, but also contributes to real ecological research. So if anyone working in those areas sees potential in this, I’d be very keen to connect.