LYFE – Levitating Planter by Simon Morris

After developing a levitating lamp FLYTE, a Stockholm-based designer Simon Morris and his team continued experimenting with maglev technology and presented a new project LYFE – a zero-gravity growing system that allows cultivating plants in mid-air. In other words, LYFE is a levitating planter.

Technologically, LYFE is quite similar to FLYTE; it consists of two separate parts – a wooden base and a planter itself that features a magnet inside. Being installed over the base, the planter can hover in the air endlessly, suspended only by magnetic fields. Moreover, LYFE is designed to gently rotate during suspension to provide 360 degrees of sunlight exposure for a growing plant.

Following the designers, the rotation especially benefits the so-called air plants (or Tillandsia), as water and nutrients are absorbed by their leaves through the air, rather than the conventional root system. Identified by a Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, these plants thrive upon the circulation of airborne particles and also don’t require soil for their growth.

For this project, the authors of the project launched a campaign on Kickstarter that has raised more than $300,000 for further development and mass production of LYFE.