Plant Your Mac

There’s always an old Mac somewhere in someone’s apartment. Maybe an iMac from the 2000s, still taking up space on a shelf. Maybe a PowerBook you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away. You can’t use it anymore—the OS is stone-age by now, and nobody makes software for it—but it’s too real to just dump.

Christophe Guinet figured out what to do with all those dead computers. He turns them into planters. Not ironically. Actually makes them nice. Plant Your Mac is the name of the project, and it works on anything: iMacs, Mac Pros, PowerBooks, whatever shell you’ve got. Gut the insides, add soil, grow something through the screen. A plant pushes out where the monitor used to be.

The thing is, Guinet doesn’t just do this. His whole practice is about nature and design colliding in weird ways. He builds installations where cars become trees. Designs logos out of grass. Works with living things as a medium the way a painter works with paint. It shouldn’t be cute enough to actually work, but it is.

I think what I like about it is how backward it is compared to what designers usually do. Most design is about acceleration—making things faster, sleeker, more efficient, better at doing what they’re supposed to do. Guinet’s looking at dead technology and asking a dumb question: what if we just let nature have it? What if decay is the point, not the enemy?

A dead Mac covered in moss and vines and wildflowers isn’t e-waste anymore. It’s something you want to look at. Something that’s actually more interesting than the computer ever was. Which is strange because the computer was designed to be beautiful—that was the whole thing with Apple, right? But the plant is more beautiful. The plant just doesn’t care about design.