Textination Newsline

Humans’ relationships with plants is largely utilitarian, serving our needs. We generally either eat them or make things out of them.
 
Researchers in the College of Human Ecology (CHE) have developed a design and fabrication approach that treats these living things as companions to humans, with seeds woven into hydrogel material for hairbands, wristbands, hats and sandals, among other applications. The seeds grow into sprouts if taken care of properly.      

“For most of human history, we have lived alongside plants, and they’ve been leveraged by humans to be used as food or spun into yarns for fabric,” said Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, associate professor of human centered design (CHE). “We’re really interested in thinking about what it might mean if we could design a more mutual, collaborative relationship with plants. Could this help us reimagine our relationships with the environment, toward more sustainable futures?”

A touch-sensing hairband is among the potential applications for LivingLoom, a design inquiry and fabrication approach integrating living plants into textiles. Other applications include a self-caring hat, a garden pillow, a Rattan woven bag and outdoor activity-encouraging sandals.

Jingwen Zhu, doctoral student in human behavior design, is lead author of “LivingLoom: Investigating Human-Plant Symbiosis Through Integrating Living Plants Into (E-)Textiles,” published April 25 and presented by Zhu at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), held April 26-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. The work won a Best Paper award at the conference, an honor reserved for the top 1% of submissions.

LivingLoom is an extension of a prototyping approach called EcoThreads, developed in Kao’s Hybrid Body Lab. EcoThreads involves two fabrication methods – wet spinning and thread coating – to fabricate functional threads from biomaterials.

In wet spinning, polymers are extruded into a coagulation bath, where the polymer solidifies into fibers. The key difference in LivingLoom: Chia seeds are incorporated into the spinning solution, a hydrogel, so that the resulting yarn contains seeds that will grow when properly cared for.

The seed-integrated yarns are then woven into textiles using a digital Jacquard loom, used to design of novel textile structures that allow for water retention and root support. Through this process, the seeds are prepared with nutrients, growing space and water, and will grow in plant-integrated textiles.

Kao and her group conducted a diary-based user study to explore how people would wear and care for plant-infused textiles in everyday settings. The researchers recruited 10 participants to wear a LivingLoom wristband for three days and chronicle their observations. The experiment was conducted in late summer, so the participants could wear short sleeves while taking part.

Participants were asked to wear the wristband for two to eight hours a day for three straight days, after which they returned the bands and were interviewed by the research team. When the user took off the device, they put it in a container to protect the growing plants.

According to Zhu, several of the participants said they had experience caring for houseplants, but “this was the first time it was a wearable, so the proximity was very close and it actually established a very intimate relationship” with the plant. Others described the symbiosis between themselves and the plant; when the plant needed water, for example, they would also get a drink.
      
Participants would also see parallels in the morning, after a good night’s sleep.

“They would put the plants back in the container at night,” Zhu said, “and in the morning they’d notice that the plants had grown taller. It was similar to how they would feel recharged by getting enough rest.”

Kao said that while houseplants grew in popularity during the pandemic as people were spending more time at home, the proximity between the wearer and LivingLoom makes the relationship stronger. “You have these living plants, these living things, directly on the skin surface and I think we seldom have that experience,” she said.

The relationships became emotional for some participants, Zhu said. “One participant said they felt connected when they woke up and saw the sprouts growing really well,” she said. “And one participant said she felt really sad when one of the sprouts fell off, because it’s so close to her body and it made her feel strongly connected.”

Of the other potential applications for LivingLoom, Zhu said, “a lot of people felt that the hat and the hairband makes a lot of sense because it’s an area where people naturally wear decorative accessories, they don’t really interfere with activity that much, and it’s naturally exposed to sunlight.”

Kao said LivingLoom could have digital agricultural and food science applications, as well. “In addition to seeds, we can weave in digital traces and yarn-embedded sensors that could be used for automatic soil condition monitoring, for example,” she said. “There is rich potential for use cases – not only on the wearable scale, but also for our environment.”

Other co-authors are Samantha Chang ’26 and Ruth Zhao, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.
This project was supported by the National Science Foundation; the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Academic Venture Fund; and the College of Human Ecology Faculty Sustainability Research Grant.

Hotel guests who can customize their rooms by selecting the layout, snack bar offerings, and softness of the pillows are more likely to become loyal customers of that hotel and recommend it to others.
 
A new study published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly finds that guests who gain some sense of ownership for their hotel room show a greater attachment to the brand after they check out. Encouraging “psychological ownership” of hotel rooms offers a new, cost-effective strategy to enhance customer loyalty, said study coauthor Suzanne Shu, dean of faculty and research at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business and John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
 
“These very small interventions, including allowing people to choose their room at the time of check-in or encouraging them to move the furniture around, can have a big impact on the sense of ownership that people feel and the loyalty they have towards the hotel,” Shu said.

The paper, “Increasing Hotel Loyalty through Psychological Ownership,” relied on four separate studies that showed the tangible benefits of increasing guests’ psychological ownership of their rooms. The study defined psychological ownership as a perceptual state that is “best described as the territorial feeling that something is ‘mine.’”

The impact of psychological ownership of hotel rooms
While the concept of psychological ownership has been used to study employee behavior in organizational settings, Shu and one of the paper’s coauthors, Joann Peck, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the first researchers to apply it to the field of marketing in a paper published in 2009.

Shu compared the concept to the sales process involving a consumer who test-drives a car and begins to feel attached to it even before making an offer on it. “What our research shows is that that will affect decisions like how much you’re willing to pay for it, because you really think of it as yours and value it a lot more,” she said.     

After exploring the concept’s effect on public spaces like parks, Shu wanted to explore whether psychological ownership would apply to spaces that consumers don’t own, such as a hotel room. She and her coauthors created four experiments that tested whether three strategies that promote psychological ownership would have an impact on the hotel guest experience: controlling the space, investing oneself in it, and having intimate knowledge of it.

The first experiment they designed was conducted at the campus hotel at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they asked prospective guests to choose their hotel room from a map, allowing them to pick a layout and floor.

“The process didn’t make their check-in process any smoother, any shorter or more convenient, but it increased their willingness to be loyal to the hotel, come back to the hotel and refer this hotel to other people around them,” said Rin Yoon, a coauthor of the paper and a PhD candidate in marketing at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management who will be teaching at the University of Iowa next fall.

In another experiment, the study analyzed a set of 14,689 reviews of a hotel in Hawaii on TripAdvisor. The assessment showed that guests who felt a sense of ownership for their hotel room wrote longer reviews and reported higher satisfaction levels on the app.

The study determined that guests who wrote reviews with the possessive pronouns “my” or “our” were more likely to have gained some sense of psychological ownership of their room. “That was a sign that they did feel ownership,” Shu said. “People aren’t going to say, ‘my room’ or ‘our room,’ unless they did feel some sense that it was theirs while they were there.”
 
The final two experiments created hypothetical check-ins online that included assessing whether a customer personalizing a room or using the hotel’s data based on previous preferences was more effective in promoting brand loyalty. The study found that guests who customized their room on their own showed greater loyalty to their hotel.

Applying the study’s results
Hotel chains have already begun using some of the strategies identified in the study, including allowing guests to personalize their rooms at check-in. That process forces guests to “exert their time and effort and invest themselves in their room,” which can promote loyalty, Yoon said.

Another strategy hotels could adopt to promote psychological ownership is allowing guests to rearrange some of the furniture in their rooms. That is exactly what Shu did during a recent hotel stay during a business trip.

“One of the first things I did to get myself set up to work was move the table a little bit closer to the window and prop the door open so I could get more sunlight from the outside,” she said. “If you allow a guest to customize their environment a little bit more, they’ll end up feeling more ownership over it because it’s like at home — they can customize their space.”