Using IA to Garden Better - Anshul Tewari | WIAD21 New Delhi
Anshul Tewari demonstrates how information architecture transforms hobbies into systematic practices, helping collectors identify gaps and achieve breakthrough results.
Using IA to Garden Better
Resource information
Presenter: Anshul Tewari
Event: WIAD 2021 New Delhi
Date Published: 2021-03-14
Duration: 23 minutes 43 seconds
Format: Talk
Language: English
Original audio: English
Subtitles: Hindi (auto-generated)
Transcript: Available
Transcript languages: English
Tags: metadata, case study, hobby, community building, classification, gardening, information architecture
Summary
This talk details the speaker's successful application of Information Architecture (IA) principles—developed professionally while running the crowdsourced platform Youth Ki Awaaz—to his passion for hybridizing rare Haworthia plants. It provides practical value by demonstrating how structured organization via an Excel sheet (tracking genus, species, and locality) solved a year of failed attempts, leading to hundreds of successful hybrids and enabling informed collection management, gap identification, and cost-saving. The talk, which emphasizes that IA is an invisible force only realized when its lack creates a "mess," is highly beneficial to IA practitioners, hobbyists, and collection builders seeking to go deeper into any complex domain through systematic, collaborative information management.
Key takeaways
Organizing information structurally (e.g., in a spreadsheet) around a collection is necessary to identify gaps, prevent random spending that "burns a hole in your pocket," and move from unsuccessful attempts to hundreds of successful outcomes, applicable to any deep hobby or collection.
Information Architecture is often "invisible until it is failing". Its critical value becomes evident when a "mess" of missing or disorganized information prevents you from achieving core objectives, whether those are professional (managing users at Youth Ki Awaaz) or personal (creating plant hybrids).
For complex biological or domain-specific collections, use a tiered classification system tracking: Genus (top-level family), Species (specific type), and Locality/Origin (where it grows or was collected). This metadata allows for informed decision-making by revealing which items are related (similar species or growth locations), thus predicting successful combination or interaction.
IA is a very collaborative exercise. Online communities facilitate IA by sharing data (often via Excel sheets) across borders, which not only strengthens individual collections but also aids in conservation efforts for species threatened in nature.
Transcript, summary, and key takeaways generated using AI assistance and may not capture all nuances of the original presentation.
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Languages Available: English
Transcript (English)
Anshul Tewari (AT): Thank you so much- that was a very kind introduction. I am delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. It's a very interesting topic. Honestly speaking, I'm bit nervous because I'm talking for the first time publicly about my passion for plants and gardening. So big, big thanks also to Gurman for recommending me for this. My background- Soik mentioned is very different. I started- and I run Youth Ki Awaaz, which is completely crowdsourced media platform- that gives space to lakhs of young people across the country to speak up on issues that they are passionate about. I've been doing this for the last 13 years. So I started this when I was 17. I was still in school at that time. One of the things that I did not anticipate was- how the platform would develop.
My first brush with information architecture, or rather the lack of it, came in when I started realizing that there are so many people who are writing on the Youth Ki Awaaz platform, who are sending in their content, who are sending in their stories, sending videos, photos... but I did not have a very organized structure of managing their information: where they come from, what they are passionate about... what motivates them to talk about something, what really gets them going when it comes to social justice issues, politics, and so on. Early on, closer to 2010, I started organizing information in the best possible way to really start understanding who these users are. Over the course of time, over the last 13 years today, organizing information around people has become something that we do a lot, and that I have become extremely passionate about.
Personally- whenever I find out about platforms that exist out there, I always want to know more about- who are the people behind it, what's the information that exists out there- and so on. When I first started gardening- gardening really here is more like a metaphor. It could be anything that you're passionate about. You can see my photo on your screen. I look extremely happy- in my garden. I'm super passionate about it. I have grown a deep sense of curiosity as well as a passion for a particular kind of a plant. This plant grows primarily in South Africa. It's called a Haworthia, broadly classified as a succulent. What's beautiful about this plant is that you can create- it's probably the only plant in the world that lets you create endless hybrids of it. You can literally hybridize any number of genuses and species that exist out there.
... You can create your own Haworthia. You can have your own plant that is very unique to you, that does not exist in the world, that you have invented pretty much. That's something that pulled me right into it because when I started collecting this plant... I started seeing people- and master growers from Japan, from all of Europe- doing this, and as the case with me, I went right into it. As you can see in the photo, I have a massive collection, more than 2,000 of these plants in my house. I've been growing them for a very, very long time now. It's been more than- very long as in it's been more than three years for a person to focus on one specific plant. I've really gone very deep into it and I've been able to gather the plants from across the world: from everywhere from South Africa where the plant originates from, to Japan, Thailand, Portugal, and so on and so forth.
Getting licenses, getting certificates to really bring the plant in, making sure I have all the approvals, and so on. It's very safe to say that I went very deep into the hobby. One of the things that I started doing about a year and a half ago was I started trying to create my own hybrids. The process of hybridizing a plant is very simple. Plants put out flowers. Flowers have pollen. You take pollen and you put it in another flower. It leads to something called a seed pod or a fruit... and that typically has seeds. You sow them when they're dry and you get a new plant. It's a very simple process for somebody who's really into gardening. If you're not into gardening, it may sound complicated, but when you get right into it, it's pretty simple.
... So I started really going quite deep into it and I started figuring out that I do want to create a hybrid of my own, and not just one, I want to create several hybrids that I can say that okay, I invented this plant in my house, in my garden. As I started going deeper into it and started learning a lot more about this particular plant, I realized that there are three very critical pieces of information that exist across this particular plant, and any plant if you're gardening. One is the genus of the plant, which is the- the top-level family of the plant that it comes from. Within the particular plant that I grow, which is called Haworthia... earlier, about more than two decades ago, there used to be a massive classification called Haworthia. Haworthia is the genus that we are talking about.
... Over the course of the last many years, that genus was then further broken down- and researchers and botanists realized that different Haworthias have different kind of features that they put out. So the genus got broken down. So there came a Haworthia, there came a Haworthiopsis, a Tulista, and blah blah blah... many more genuses came about. Now, within the genuses are the species. In front of your screen, you see two very different kind of Haworthias. The one that's a bit more red is now classified as a Haworthiopsis. It's called a Haworthiopsis coarctata v. conemorata. And the one that's not so red is called a Haworthia vimeie. That's the species of the plant that exists out there. The third very important part of any single plant is the location that it comes from. Many plants are of course born in nature.
... You can literally find out the location where it was sown, or where it was grown, where it was growing in nature, etc. But many of them also come from the gardens of different hybridizers. They come from the gardens of different collectors. This hobby, by the way, is vast. When I got into it, my first 20 plants, and I thought that I have the world. But then I started discovering people who had thousands of them. I'll give you an example: There is a group on Facebook called the International Haworthia Study Group, which has more than 15,000 people, and that's just one of about 30 such groups that I'm a part of, which has thousands of people growing this plant. There's really a very solid community out there of people who are passionate about this one particular plant.
When I started hybridizing them initially- I would pick plants at random and I would try and cross-pollinate them and I would try and see if a seed pod would emerge. For almost a year, I was completely unsuccessful at it and I could not really wrap my head around what was going on... At that time, I didn't care as much about the identification of the plant. I didn't care what species it was. I looked at it, I liked, did it look great? I got it. But over the course of time, as I realized that if I really want to create hybrids, I need to understand the plant better. I started organizing the information a lot better and I did something super simple. I put together an Excel sheet, the one that you see in front of you right now. It's very simply classified. There's the genus of the plant. There's the species of the plant, there's the locality of the plant, and there's a collection number.
So, I even went down to understanding whose collection it comes from... and the number signifies when the plant was born... what level of parentage it has, etc. If you Google some of these numbers, you'll get all the information because the people who have collected them, the letters that you see (MBB, IB), they're names of collectors. They're initials of the names of the collectors. You'll find all the information that they've put out publicly about their collection and you'll know exactly how they're growing.
When I started putting this information together, I started understanding a lot better which of my plants come from similar locations, which basically means that if a plant is growing in nature at the same location, if two different plants are growing in nature at the same location, there's a very high chance that there is natural pollination occurring between the two of them, which gives me the indication that I can go ahead and do it as well. Similarly, I started realizing that if there are two plants that look similar, they're from the same species but are different in the way they look. For example, if you see the list that I have in front of you, the second plant over there is called Haworthia atenuata and the third is called Haworthia atenuata v. radula. They're two very different-looking plants but they come from the same family. That started giving me the indication that okay, this is related. These two plants are related.
I can start hybridizing them- as well. Slowly and steadily, as I went deeper into it, I was able to very successfully create hundreds of hybrids all of a sudden. I was getting a tremendous amount of seed pods on my plants. I was able to grow my garden from about 1,500 at that time and suddenly added 500 more to my collection. As of right now, I have close to 2,000, and I have almost probably more than 800 seeds that are waiting to be sown. My garden is growing at a tremendous speed. The place where this helps is not just to help me make the decision about what I want to hybridize. It also helps me strengthen my collection. This applies not just to plants. It applies to everything. It applies to art. It applies to any hobby that you're passionate about, any collection that you're trying to build. It applies to philately.
It applies to collecting coins, for example. If you're able to structurally organize information around the things that you're passionate about, it helps you also find the gaps. It helps you find out what you're missing in your collection and where you could possibly get it from. A lot of the information when I started organizing it, it started helping me understand in a very structured way what was the next plant I wanted. So I stopped making random purchases because the one thing about collections is that it can really burn a hole in your pocket... and you don't even realize when it does that. The moment you start organizing the information around your passion or what your hobby is, you start realizing what you want to say no to and what you want more of. That's the best thing that organizing information around this particular plant helped me. As you can see in this photo, I have a crazy collection.
This plant that you're seeing in front of your screen right now is a hybrid of the two plants I showed you a little while back. This hybrid was created in my garden. So, I was able to successfully create this hybrid as well. I just want to show you my first hybrid that I created, which I called the Orion, which doesn't exist in nature. It's a beautiful hybrid between two different species that I put together. Now, I'm slowly and steadily getting into intergeneric hybrids: not just hybrids within the Haworthia family, but related families as well. That's what honestly organizing information can really do for the things that you're curious about, the things that you're passionate about. It can help you build a stronger sensibility around them. It can help you find out more and really go deeper into your hobby... and not just have it as a side thing.
It can become something that becomes a very integral part of your identity, just how this passion is becoming for me. So- with that I'll wrap up. I really hope that this information was helpful for all of you and that you'll be able to apply some of these things to your passions and the things that you're really going after. As I said, it's not just applicable for plants. It's applicable for anything that you're passionate about and you're trying to build a collection around in particular. Thank you so much for having me. So, if there are any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer.
Interviewer (I): Thanks a lot, Anshul. That was a fantastic short talk- and definitely very inspiring. This talk should have been titled "Using IA to Save Money," because no one would have thought it that way. Also, you started off with a very nice introduction to IA in the sense that you don't really realize when IA is good, but when you start off with a mess or there is a lack of IA, that is more evident in a way. Which is the part you started with, the Youth Ki Awaaz bit. Could you talk a little bit more about that aspect, as in how IA is invisible until it is failing?
AT: Yeah, absolutely. In fact- not just in terms of the platform, even in terms of how you manage your team, how you organize the key skills that your team has... how you're thinking of building sales processes, how you're thinking of building potential funding opportunities. There is missing information everywhere, which honestly leads to a mess for sure. It's only when that mess comes in front of you is when you realize that this was right in front of us all this while and we should have thought of organizing this better. It's all something that honestly I've gone through- not just in terms of the platform, as I said, in terms of the team, in terms of funding opportunities, revenue streams, etc. Even with my hobby for plants, the fact that I could have used IA to organize them better did not come naturally. It came at a point where I was not being able to create hybrids and then I started realizing that okay, maybe I should start understanding the information around these plants a bit better. It's okay because sometimes just organizing information sounds and seems a bit tiring, and it seems a bit- very process-oriented, and people don't like processes. Everybody hates structures and processes. I feel you start off not appreciating it, but you end up appreciating it a lot when it becomes very simple, very well organized, and something that actually helps you move much faster. It's only the initial moments when it's a bit tiring, but the long-term benefits of organizing information properly are terrific.
I: Right. Absolutely. At this point, I would remind our audience: if you are on Zoom, you can use the Q&A tab to give us questions for which I'll take it to... and if you're on YouTube or any other live stream channel, then please use the live chat tools that are there, put in your questions, and they'll be forwarded to me over here. Coming back to you, Anshul... IA, as we understand, is a subset of UX in a way. It gives you a better user experience and enables you to do things. Would you call yourself someone who is from a UX background?
AT: It's very tricky, but I like to believe that I am because I really love and enjoy understanding user experiences personally.
I: Right. Do you think people need special powers to be able to do IA?
AT: Not at all. It's just being able to put logical information together and you just need practice and understanding of the kind of sets of information that you have.
I: Right. Absolutely. Okay. So it is fair to say that without having organized your entire information, you wouldn't have been able to achieve all the things that you've achieved.
AT: Absolutely.
I: At any stage do you feel... or rather let me say at this stage, what are the next things? Because everyone gets an idea... for example, the Ganesh Talk, when I heard it- you're almost presenting information in a way in which you have understood it, but then the fact that there's a potential for many more things to be discovered beyond that is there, and that is something that always skips our mind. So wherever you are today, what is next? What are the next things that you might be able to discover?
AT: So- as far as this particular hobby or passion that I have is concerned, my next step is to make a lot of this information public, because there are many other collectors out there who are trying this but are not being able to be successful at it. I think there are groups of people who are already organizing a lot of information around this, and I definitely want to very actively contribute to the creation of that process. I see that as a next step because also it helps build a stronger community. It helps bring more people into it. It helps introduce the hobby to a lot more people as well.
I: Right. Right. So there's this question from Thompson, who asks what role has online communities played in developing your hobby, and do you have some thoughts about IA being a collaborative exercise?
AT: Yeah, absolutely. The communities that already existed around this particular plant played a very big role in helping me develop this hobby because when I started getting introduced to other growers in other parts of the world, not only did I get access to information that I had absolutely no clue about, but also I got free plants. They love the fact that I was trying to do something to this tune and they loved exchanging plants and I got a whole bunch of them. I now I'm very closely knit as a member of many of these communities as well. I do think IA is a very collaborative exercise. There are several of these Excel sheets that I have with growers from Portugal, from Canada, from Japan, who are constantly adding information. Very recently there was one particular species of the plant that I talked about which got completely eradicated from nature because there was a highway that was constructed where it grows. But a lot of collectors from across the world were able to come together and put together information around the plant because they had it and they were able to collect it from different growers, etc. So I think it definitely is a very collaborative exercise for sure.
I: Okay, another question. AJ from YouTube has asked: Were you able to use information mapping techniques or IA around watering and caring for these plants because plants from different regions would need different care?
AT: That's a great question... Honestly, I haven't gone as deep yet. I very perceptively just decide- the care and the watering schedule. Honestly, because they also come from the same genus, 90% of their care is the same. It's only 10% that's different because they come from a different location. Their flowering cycle is different, etc. But that doesn't make a huge difference to me. But- now that you say it, I do think that there is definitely some applicability of information architecture around how you care for a lot of these plants.
I: Right. So on that note- you already have shown us some of the Excel sheet. Are there any aspect of categorizing, classifying, or anything that probably you have done and it's unique to you and the other collectors are not doing it that way, because information can be seen differently by different people?
AT: Absolutely. The Excel sheet that I showed you is a very standard way of organizing information because that's how most collectors around the world do it. But of course when I create hybrids, this is not a hybridization sheet that I showed you. The information that I save over there is very different... it looks very different. I am able to put down a very deep level of parentage of the plant. That's something that I saw only one grower based in France do. He was very kind enough to share how he organized that information, and I was able to learn a lot from him. But yeah, the information around hybridization is probably very differently stored with me as opposed to a lot of people who are growing the plant across the world.
I: Got it. And another question from Misha... Apart from hybridization, what other aspects of gardening or plant collection can we use IA for?
AT: Just the fact that you're building a collection, because it helps you see the gaps in terms of what you don't have and what you could or should have. And, as you said, how to save money. That's a very critical aspect because now- if you've noticed during COVID, people went berserk buying house plants and spent a crazy amount of money on plants, and many of them also lost a lot of plants because the information doesn't exist as easily. That's the challenge with a hobby like plant growing. You talk to one grower sitting in some part of the world, their conditions are very different from your conditions, and you might think that okay, if I do it this way, it'll work for me as well, but it doesn't. I feel it can really help you grow them better beyond just hybridizing the kind of plants that you have.
I: All right, there are two more minutes that we have with you, and I have two questions at this point of time, if there are no other questions. One is that after reaching where you have reached, do you still discover something fascinating when you put together information, and can you tell us something fascinating that you have recently discovered?
AT: Absolutely. I can give you two examples, one from more of my work domain. One of the things that we at Youth Ki Awaaz have been trying to figure out is that we've been a writing space for more than a decade now, and where do we go from here? What's the next step that we should take? Just looking at the very obvious information, you can tell that people don't just want to write, people want to create videos, people want to share photos, etc. But when you move beyond that and when you discover information that's lot deeper than that, you realize that beyond writing and sharing information, people just want to talk to each other, people just want to connect with each other. That's a piece of information that I discovered just by chance while going through a lot of the surveys that we do with our audiences and a lot of the conversations that we have with our community. Similarly, in my garden as well, I recently discovered that I might be able to create one of the rarest hybrids ever, because two of the parent plants that are very difficult to get happen to be in my collection. They come from two completely different parts of the world, and I'm giving it a shot. I'm trying it out.
I: My final question, and in under a minute, how do you create a hybrid? Do you just lock two plants together in a room?
AT: Yeah. And you put on some candles and that's it. No... honestly, if you really want to know, you take the pollen of a plant and you put it in another plant. You just pick it out...
I: You play bee.
AT: So I use a very fine hair brush. I dip it in the flower of a plant and then I dip it in another flower of another plant. That's that's
I: Wow. This is definitely fascinating. Okay.
Transcript highlights
Important concept:
"You don't really realize when IA is good but when you start off with a mess or there is a lack of IA that is more evident in a way."
Part of Collections
This resource is maintained by Grace Lau.
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