Eric - A Growing Book

This is a book about life and spirit, which the reader can nurture plants, as well read a book simultaneously. You get to water and take care of your plants everyday as you see the book, which brings about a different and unique experience. Turning static words about life in the book into a process, this planting and reading experience is enhanced. No high technology or no special material is required. Simply, this exemplifies the true meaning of life, which is hidden in the sentences between the shadows cast by the plants in the sunshine.

Books are always considered as static objects in people’s mind, transferring feeling through words, pictures and imagination they produce. So to break this traditional impression, the semantic design values of the following prose - florilegium, which means “book on life”, is embedded into this product design. People can plant whatever they like in the left side of the book, to care for it and watch it grow. During this process, readers not only learn the meaning of life, but also create life themselves.

Readers can also plant seeds in the grids according to the picture pixels. The key to designing the pictures or letters by oneself and plant it - this book would be a unique gift for everybody.

About the Designer

Eric graduated from Industrial Design program in a Chinese university located in Nanjing, which is a big city near Shanghai. After taking charge of a family company that was specialized in producing and exporting electronic products for US market, he revamped “a factory with a design department” into “a design company with a factory” in mind. This made his company able to handle product service from design and manufacturing to export entirely. So in the developing process, design becomes an important consideration over other conventional process considerations.

Now he is pursuing his master degree in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

“Find an unexpected but simple way” is his design principle.

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