Taking care of new houseplants can be difficult. Mostly because we, and by we, I mean millennials, always end up bringing the tall full fern home where we imagine it cascading gently from the pot to the floor, but who are we kidding? We’re too distracted, plucking at the long leaves to hear the florist’s home instructions. It’s happened to the best of us and houseplants are more popular now than ever before, so it’s understandable. Thankfully, when it comes to plant care, designers are here to make it easy.

Wazai, from Abilliant, is an award-winning, wirelessly autonomous gardening assistant for your plant and comes with an app that allows you to care for your houseplants while you’re away from home, earning iF World Design’s 2020 Award for Product Design. According to each plant’s individual needs, Wazai waters your plant automatically and advises you of the best location for optimal sunlight. Wazai comes with two main components. The first, the inner pot, is what the user fills with fresh soil for the house plant to mix into, then the inner pot clicks into the bigger pot. Wazai runs using alkaline batteries that will have to be changed once every six months and the plastic used to produce the pot is UV-resistant, waterproof, and complete with a drainage system. Aligning the inner pot with the larger pot’s lock-and-click mechanism, the user can then pour around two liters worth of water into the larger pot from any angle. Then, Wazai takes over.

Once the houseplant is all settled in its new digs, the user connects it with Wazai’s phone app, which lists a wide range of houseplants to choose from. Once the app’s software matches the houseplant’s watering and sunlight needs, then it waters houseplants for the user through an automatic spraying function and will always let users know when batteries need replacing. Wazai determines what each houseplant needs through an interface that notes the quality and dryness of the inner pot’s soil. Additionally, since the app records humidity and sunlight data for every type of popular houseplant in the fully-integrated plant library found on the app, users can find out where to best position their houseplant indoors.

If you’ve got that coral-like, crimson-green Croton, then Wazai will search your room for the most direct, bright sunlight and water it only so often to keep the soil moist, but not wet. Or, if you’ve got a big, leafy fast-growing pot of ivy, then the app connected to Wazai will inform you of a space inside your room where there’s some sunlight, but not too much and ivy plants are thirsty ones, so Wazai will always keep the water flowing. Either way, Wazai’s got it covered.

Designer: Abilliant