By Conner Eastwood and Ewan McIntosh, March 2026
StudioCone’s Plurality Player Wants You to Feel the Planet
The Plurality Player is a portable, two-way communication device, translating resonant biological signals in both directions between human users and ecological systems. Designed by futures studio StudioCone as part of their speculative project Symbiotic Systems, it renders natural processes and ecosystem health as haptic, sensory experiences to the user, and in turn the user’s biological state becomes biochemical signals transmitted back into the environment. A conversation mediated through perception rather than language.
The device itself borrows from the silhouette of a stethoscope, recast through an animist lens. It can detect the lifeforce present in every living thing, and translates those signals into an interface designed for easy interpretation of four categories of data: stress, nutrients, signals and resonance. This allows the human user to understand the health of the ecosystem they are interacting with, and see variation across time and location.
What makes it radical is its function as an archive. The Plurality Player allows you to record and play back your conversations with the ecosystems around you; a living diary of your relationship with the world. Over time, it acts as a record of change, of attunement, of what the land has said and what you have given back.
The Plurality Player exists within a speculative 2030, where humanity failed to meet the 1.5°C target and ANIMA, an autonomous planetary intelligence combining artificial and biological systems, emerges to guide planetary stability. If you were mandated a product that helped you feel the hidden, intertwined rhythms of life, would it make you feel more connected to the planet, or numb to the richness of life all around us?
Inspired by the mycorrhizal network, StudioCone asks whether mutualist symbiotic relationships can be attained between humanity and nature, and what it could mean for our planetary future if we began to consider all organic matter alive, conscious, and in constant conversation with us.
The device is, ultimately, a metaphor for something that requires no device at all. What we need is not the technology to listen, only the desire to do so.
Symbiotic Systems is a collaboration between Conner Eastwood and Ewan McIntosh, with sound design and original score by George Davies.
To read more about the Symbiotic Systems project, visit @studiocone_
