About
Mega Mario is an Indonesian multidisciplinary designer whose practice spans visual communication, packaging, digital media, moving image and video production.
Her work explores how design can translate complex information, lived experience, and embodied knowledge into accessible and engaging forms.
Her current practice expands into research, technology, prototyping, and storytelling, exploring how physical and digital design can support more accessible and culturally grounded experiences.
TERRA is a design research project exploring how embodied soil knowledge can be translated into accessible tactile, digital and sensing experiences for Indonesian smallholder farmers. The core idea is that technology should support and extend existing farming knowledge, rather than replace it.
TERRA Project
TERRA explores how embodied soil knowledge and accessible technology can come together within the everyday practices of Indonesian smallholder farmers.
Developed through fieldwork, prototyping, and user testing, the project looks at how farmers understand soil through touch, moisture, texture, colour and experience.
Rather than replacing these ways of knowing, TERRA uses design to translate and extend them through two connected outcomes: TERRA Archive, which preserves and shares sensory soil knowledge through tactile and digital experiences, and the TERRA Sensor, which translates measurable soil moisture into simple visual and sound-based feedback.
Together, the project proposes a more accessible and culturally grounded relationship between traditional knowledge, design, and technology.
TERRA presented as a connected ecosystem of soil sensing, tactile archives, digital storytelling and research outcomes.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
TERRA uses a practice-led and field-based research approach, combining observation, informal interviews, farmer and government officer shadowing, prototyping and user testing.
The project draws on theories of tacit and embodied knowledge, sensory ethnography and humanity-centred design to explore how lived farming knowledge can be translated into tactile, digital and sensing experiences.
The research positions design as a mediator between traditional knowledge and technology, focusing on how both can coexist within everyday farming practices.
Masturah Maidin
Sabrina Japit
Rhea Pasricha
Franca Isabelle Pilchner
Lim Eng Kit, Rachel
Rakshitha Raghunandan
