During my masters at UAL, Sainsbury's Nectar team challenged with a deliberately provocative brief: design a loyalty scheme run by local plants. It prompted us to imagine a different kind of system entirely: one where the logic of loyalty is authored not by a brand, but by nature. Rather than treating this as an abstract thought experiment, we used it as a lens to interrogate some of the most fundamental questions in enterprise with loyalty design- who gets rewarded, for what behaviours, when and what kind of relationship should a brand have with its customers over time.
The Oaken Circle is a speculative, multi-generational loyalty system. It uses plant health as the measure of human behaviour, rewarding ecological care, community action and long-term stewardship rather than basket size. It is technical, systemic and designed to be passed down across generations.
Understanding the existing system
Shifting the lens: what do plants value?
Testing communication across difference
One of our key research questions was: how do you design for a relationship where one party cannot explicitly communicate their needs? We ran a small-scale experiment using moisture sensors to explore how plants signal their state, an analogy for designing systems that respond to implicit customer signals rather than only explicit ones. The MA UX cohort was given the assignment to take care of the Medo.
Key insights: customers who feel a loyalty scheme "notices" them. Through personalised, contextual moments rather than generic offers are significantly more likely to engage habitually. Designing for implicit signals, not just explicit actions, is where the real opportunity lies..
THE SYSTEM
Onboarding A joining ritual connects the customer to a local plant species. This is not account creation, it is an act of commitment. The ritual is designed to be physical, memorable and meaningful.
Monitoring Arduino-based biosensors track plant health in real time. The system reads moisture levels, growth patterns and ecosystem indicators, translating ecological data into signals the loyalty scheme can act on. Plants effectively become the arbiters of reward.
Nurturing Customers take actions that directly benefit the plant ecosystem by composting, mulching, building pollinator hotels, monitoring invasive species. These behaviours are tracked and rewarded. Shopping behaviour alone is not enough.
Passing on the Legacy The system is designed to transfer. Accumulated stewardship, history and rewards can be passed to the next generation, creating a loyalty logic that operates on a timescale no conventional scheme has attempted.
INTERACTION DESIGN
Bodystorming in the field
We made storyboards based on the system design, then took those to Epping Forest and enacted the onboarding and legacy rituals of our scheme through bodystorming. This immersive method revealed gaps in our journey, moments where the experience felt confusing or disconnected, that we would not have found sitting at a desk. It reinforced my belief that experience design requires physically inhabiting the journey, not just mapping it.
Exhibition and live testing
We displayed our prototype and system at the LCC Work in Progress gallery, using it as a live research opportunity. We asked three targeted questions to gallery visitors about their perceptions of loyalty, rewards and their relationship with local plants. The insights fed directly back into our design iteration, a compressed version of the continuous discovery process used in agile product teams.
ON TECHNOLOGY
A deliberate choice about tools
Early in the project we explored VR as a possible interface — a Meta Quest prototype that could immerse users in the system's world. We stepped back from it. In line with the Braiding Sweetgrass principles underpinning the project, we were committed to designing with accessible, evolving tools rather than technologies that create new barriers to entry.
The Arduino biosensor approach was chosen
OUTCOME
This project was one of the most challenging design briefs I have worked on. It was fully speculative and required me to simultaneously hold rigorous UX thinking and radical creative provocation. Working directly with the Sainsbury's Nectar team gave it real stakes.
The most useful thing this project demonstrated is that loyalty design is fundamentally a systems problem — not a marketing one.
The mechanics of a scheme matter far less than the feedback loops it creates, the behaviours it normalises over time, and the relationship it builds between a brand and its customers across years, not quarters. Designing at Sainsbury's scale means those feedback loops operate on 1.2 billion annual interactions. Getting the underlying logic right is the work.