bionic ball 'wasteland nomad' by yizhuo guo heals damaged lands

Healing wastelands using non-motored bionic tumbleweed ball

To heal the wastelands, designer Yizhuo Guo creates a bionic Tumbleweed plant-inspired ‘nomad’ ball that rolls around to plant seeds. A passive, unpowered biomimetic structure, the device named Wasteland Nomad moves through a damaged landscape without a motor, a power source, or a human operator, and deposits the materials the soil needs to begin recovering. The design draws from the tumbleweed, which is a plant that, once it dries out and detaches from its root, rolls across open ground driven by wind. As it rolls, it disperses seeds using aerodynamics to spread its reproductive material across a wide area. Yizhuo Guo took that behavior and embedded it into her project.

The Wasteland Nomad is built from biochar and seeds of indigenous plants, which are both biodegradable materials. Biochar is a form of charcoal produced by heating organic material in a low-oxygen environment. Biochar works like a sponge inside the soil, as it holds water, gives microbes a surface to live on, and locks carbon into the ground instead of letting it escape into the air. In soil that has been acidified or contaminated by heavy metals, those three start to shift the chemical balance back toward something plants can grow in. The seeds inside the Wasteland Nomad are not generic, but plants that belonged to that specific piece of land before the industry arrived. Yizhuo Guo’s idea is not to introduce something new. It is to return what was there.

all images courtesy of Yizhuo Guo

Yizhuo Guo’s wasteland nomad can plant seeds on its own

When the bionic Tumbleweed-inspired structure comes into contact with land moisture, it opens up. The branches spread outward, pressing more of the surface against the ground, and that contact is what starts the planting of the seed. The biochar releases into the soil, and the seeds reach the ground at the exact moment when the moisture that triggered the opening also makes germination possible. The whole sequence happens because of water and nothing else. There’s no sensor or timer needed because the moisture is more than enough to get it going.

Once Wasteland Nomad is released into a site, it rolls until it finds the right conditions, then it slowly disappears since it’s made of biodegradable materials. This project connects to something larger than engineering. Most plans for cleaning up post-industrial land require money, machinery, chemical treatment, and people on the ground for years. In places like Norilsk, Fukushima exclusion zone, the abandoned mining regions of Central Asia – the places the designer mentioned for the project – the lands are damaged and the resources to fix them are non-existent. Yizhuo Guo’s project starts with devising a repair system that costs almost nothing, because it runs on wind and water and the natural behavior of materials and ends with a viable solution that can heal our wastelands.

view of PHA skin build+local seeds implantation