By Izzie Ramirez

Harpreet Sareen is on a mission to turn the average houseplant into a sensor that can make city life safer, smarter, and more alive. 

Sareen grew up in Punjab, the epicenter of India’s “Green Revolution,” where lush wheat fields and agricultural abundance shaped his early life. But as he started building a career designing inert infrastructure such as cell phone towers, he found himself in an identity crisis. The technological landscape he was helping create felt entirely divorced from the natural ecosystems of his childhood.

In 2018, he built his first “plant robot,” an early prototype now known as Elowan. Instead of relying on algorithms to make decisions, Elowan is made up of a plant directly connected to a robotic system, translating the plant’s internal electrical responses into movement that propels the robot toward light. That experiment laid the groundwork for MIT Media Lab’s Cyborg Botany initiative, which he cofounded later that same year alongside media technology professor Pattie Maes. 

Cyborg botany harnesses plants’ natural ability to respond to their environment and translates those subtle biological signals into legible forms. Since founding MIT Media Lab’s Cyborg Botany initiative, Sareen and Maes have developed a series of prototypes that integrate circuitry into plant systems, effectively turning plants into living sensors.