This is a foundational text that redefines design not as surface decoration but as the interface between ideas, objects, and ideology. Flusser explores every designed object embodies a form of thinking—materialized philosophy that encodes cultural, historical, and political narratives. This conceptual framework provides a rich foundation for my artistic research, which uses orchids to explore Taiwan’s layered identity and colonial legacies through both analogue (engraving) and digital (sensor-based) interventions. There are some key points in relation to my practice-based exploration.

1. Design as Mediation Between Nature and Culture

Flusser describes design as the human intervention into nature, shaping it according to cultural codes. Orchids exemplify this duality: they are both natural organisms and heavily designed commodities, cultivated, hybridized, and aestheticized through both agricultural and visual cultures.

In Taiwan, the orchid industry represents a complex intersection of nature, nationalism, and neoliberalism. My practice engages with this by intervening in orchid imagery. Through engraving, recompositing, and translating their bio-signals into vision and sound, I enact a Flusserian concept of design. This process questions how natural forms are appropriated, idealized, and instrumentalized by cultural systems.

2. The "Programmed Apparatus" and My Use of Playtronica and sensors

Flusser is deeply concerned with how tools or apparatuses structure and limit creative thought. He argues that the apparatus is not neutral; it imposes a "program" that designers/artists either conform to or attempt to subvert. My use of Playtronica Biotron and some sensors to convert orchid signals into sound and vision falls directly into this debate: am I merely "playing" within a technical framework, or can I hack the apparatus to reveal unheard narratives of the plant?

This dynamic between control and expression, programming and poetics, reflects Flusser’s vision of design as a site of struggle. By recontextualizing the orchid as a sounding body, I attempt to resist its historical positioning as a silent object of exotic desire, instead proposing an interactive, responsive identity for the plant.

3. The Gesture of Cutting and the Ethics of Design

Flusser’s reflections on gesture as a bodily, symbolic act of shaping directly inform my method of engraving small pieces or hand-forms into printed orchid images. The act of cutting is both violent and intimate, suggesting control over the image but also vulnerability of the surface. Flusser contextualises every gesture of design is an ethical choice; each mark implies intention, ideology, and power.

In my work, this gesture is used to symbolize Taiwan’s fraught identity, “cut” by colonial histories including Japanese, Chinese, Western influences, and constantly re-inscribed through botanical, political, and visual regimes. The wound in the image becomes a metaphor for the wound in identity.

4. Symbolic Function and Objecthood

Flusser argues that objects are no longer valued for function alone but for their symbolic meaning. Design has moved from solving problems to crafting myths and projections. This is precisely how orchids function in my research: not as natural specimens, but as symbols of national identity, diaspora, and idealized femininity.

By designing interactions that make orchids “speak” (through sensors) or bleed (through engraving), I engage with the semiotic dimension of objects that Flusser emphasizes. My work explores how botanical forms become signs within broader discourses—orientalism, bio-capitalism, postcolonialism—and how design can both reveal and disturb those meanings.

5. Design and Future Memory

Flusser ends with a warning: design shapes not only objects but also the future. Designed things “store” memory, ideology, and expectation. In this light, my research asks: What future is encoded in the orchid? Is it one of continued commodification and spectacle, or of resilience and listening? By animating orchids through technology, I attempt to design a speculative future in which Taiwanese identity is not fixed in image, but voiced in vibration, sound, and relational presence.

Conclusion

Vilém Flusser’s The Shape of Things offers a profound theoretical foundation for thinking about orchids as designed objects, embedded in cultural systems that manipulate, idealize, and silence. By situating my practice within his philosophy of design, I articulate a critical strategy that engages gesture, apparatus, and symbolic violence. My work shifts focus from object to interface, from silent image to interactive encounter.

In this way, the practice not only redponds to Flusser’s concerns but extends them into new territories where plants become media, cutting becomes critique, and design becomes a decolonial practice of listening.