During our ideation day Lennart Andersson threw out a concept: What if you could grow wood that could be a conductor? What if you watered a tree with conductive ink one year, waited a year or two, then watered again with conductive ink, then waited… could the tree rings be conductor, insulator, conductor?

So I set out to make a “tap” (kind of like a maple syrup tree tap) that one could insert into a predrilled hole in a tree. The sections of the tap would contact the conductive growth rings in the tree. Then electronics could take power, ground and signal from the three rings. You could also harvest the wood and potentially “tap” a wooden table top and mount a lamp or electronic hardware.

This is the “far out scifi” concept in the bunch and very little thought has gone into (or will likely go into) making a system like this actually work.

I am now scripting a short video where we will tap some wood in a forest nearby. I have built out a whole toolbag for the Computational Wood forestry worker.

Video coming soon.

thanks to Ryan Coyle (RISD student) who helped me out in the metal shop.