Designing for Conservation
Plant blindness is the phenomenon where humans may walk by thousands of plants a day and may not notice a single one. But once they are able to identify and name a single species, they will see it everywhere.
In order to encourage people to engage in and promote conservation, we need people to care about nature. And for them to care, we need them to connect to nature. Emerging technologies such as augmented reality and AI are powerful ways to do this because they remove the barrier to entry of learning to identify and name organisms.
iNaturalist’s technology and community-based identification presents a powerful opportunity to allow anyone with a smartphone (roughly 66% of the world) to identify, learn about, and empathize with the organisms around them. By creating human-nature connections at the individual and community levels, we can encourage conservation at a global level.
For a deeper dive, you can watch Abhas’s talk at Anchorage Design Week: Designing for Empathy using Augmented Reality.
Seek by iNaturalist
Released in 2019, Seek by iNaturalist is an iOS & Android app that enables anyone to identify and connect to the life all around them using augmented reality.
This app was initially released in conjunction with Netflix & WWF’s series Our Planet.
As the Product Lead and Product Designer on this project, Abhas was given the AR Camera functionality by the iNat development team and tasked with designing a kid-friendly app aimed at helping anyone curious about nature connect to the species around them. He created the UX, UI, branding, visual, and marketing design of Seek.
Designing Seek combined some of Abhas’s biggest passions: Augmented Reality, wildlife, and UX Design, and helped him realize that he loves working on mission-driven products with massive creative freedom.
In 2020, Seek was honored with the Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Honor from the American Library Association.
In 2021, Seek was featured in Apple’s iPhone Keynote.
iNaturalist
iNaturalist is a community of nature enthusiasts who observe and identify wildlife and plant species across the world, creating a global database of life using citizen science.
With hundreds of millions of observations by observers worldwide, iNaturalist is the world’s largest community of naturalists and one of the foremost and well-known biodiversity observation websites in the world.
To learn more, you can explore iNaturalist’s wealth of community-curated data or explore Abhas’s life list.
Rebranding iNaturalist
In 2019, Abhas rebranded iNaturalist’s identity to reflect its values of scientific reputability, curiosity, and community. As of 2023, he has designed and led the branding of 17 local network sites of iNaturalist across five continents. Each country or region is represented by one of its iconic species in the same style as the iNaturalist bird.