Infrastructuring Food Democracy (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
This paper introduces the concept of 'food democracy' as a theoretical framing for HCI to engage in human-food interaction. Extending existing foci of health and environmental sustainability, food democracy requires thinking through aspects of social and economic justice, and democratic governance as directions for the study and design of technologies for alternative food movements. To exemplify food democracy, we report on field observations and interviews about the opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of local food networks with communities in deprived neighbourhoods using an online direct food marketing platform. Using a food democracy framing, we identify tensions around environmental, social, and economic goals; challenges of local food businesses operating within the existing economic paradigm; and differing perspectives on ownership and governance in the network. We discuss the need for HCI to design for systems change and propose a design space for HCI in supporting food democracy movements.
“Ideas Sharing LAB”. Co-designing multifunctional services with local food communities
In recent years design has taken an active role in projects for ‘place’ development (e.g. Dott07, Veil), where a series of local projects aimed to nudge a region in a more sustainable direction (Jegou, 2010; Manzini, 2010b). In this framework service design seeks to foster new relations and create synergies among local actors and services (Mirata & Ristola, 2005). In the case of periurban agriculture it means creating a network of de-mediated services (Renting et al., 2003, Meroni, 2006) to connect small-scale sustainable farmers with the city dwellers. The paper presents the main results of the author’s doctoral research achieved through case studies and a participatory action research carried out within two farmers’ markets. The research firstly detected a new service typology, called multifunctional service, pointing out its added value in terms of creating local networks of people and services. Then, from the actions undertaken in the markets it went on to define a new format for service design intervention called Ideas Sharing LAB (IS-LAB).This takes the form of a temporary living lab in the farmers’ markets to co-design new collaborative services with a Community Centred Design approach (Meroni, 2011), i.e. designing with and within the local community of farmers and city dwellers. The paper concludes by outlining the methods and tools of ISLAB and the opportunities offered by community Centred Design in ‘place’ development projects.
Food Sovereignty (food freedom) is about empoweing people to develop their own local food system. Food Sovereignty challenges designers to enable people to innovate the local food system, rather than having a food system which is dictated by corporate interests and failed business ethics [1]. Communities are realising the potential for design to assist in the innovation process, and add strategic value to potentially localise the food system [2]. Design Led Innovation (DLI) offers a strategic framework to address large-scale cultural, systemic and economic changes. The DLI approach empowers communities to take organised action to achieve a healthy, prosperous and happy way of life. DLI can assist with business models in the business world and it is evident this approach can assist with creating social change too [14]. This paper presents an emerging research agenda aimed to assist designers shift their focus from individuals and systems to communities and urban problems. This paper also presents the research proposition that DLI and service design coupled with social entrepreneurial ventures such as local food projects and creative community inventions, have the potential to enable social innovation for healthy and happy communities.
Designing local food systems in everyday life through service design strategies
The paper's practical objective is to provide those developing community-scale food systems with an implementable model. Its theoretical objective is to examine the ways to effectively design post-capitalist models for food systems. In providing a testable model for food systems design, the paper advances concept formation in the field. The case study approach recognizes that local food systems design cannot depend on abstract, formalized models due to the specificity of each project. The crucial role for designers include the involvement of end-users in everyday life in the research process, experimentation in everyday life, building relationships, as well as prototyping, policy making and implementation of services to be delivered by public agencies. People-led food systems can engage agencies and citizens in a co-production process whereby users design and implement their own service program that can be enabled by public agencies. Design-led food strategies illustrate an approach to create eco-acupuncture points that will ultimately start to change the dominant industrial agriculture system into a new social and economic paradigm.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2023
This paper illustrates the work of creating, infrastructuring, and organising a food-sharing community from the ground up. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and a threeyear engagement with FoodSharing Stockholm, the paper shows how the processes of starting up a grassroots initiative are shaped by participants' direct experience and knowledge of similar initiatives. The analysis draws attention to: (1) how central activities such as recruiting volunteers, choosing digital tools, and establishing partnerships with food donors are conceived and organised, (2) the concrete challenges of sharing surplus food, such as adopting a distribution model, and negotiating fairness, and (3) how governance and decision-making models are adopted and (re)negotiated over time. The paper introduces the term Collective histories of organising to capture the impact that learning from previous experiences can have on communities' efforts to set up and run; and reorient design visions towards the consideration and adoption of existing sociotechnical practices, rather than always aiming at novel digital explorations. We outline three emerging dimensions that can characterise "Collective histories of organising" as a concept, (1) configuring capacities, (2) configuring sociotechnical practices, and (3) configuring participation. The paper contributes practical sensitivities to build, sustain, and infrastructure surplus food-sharing initiatives, where these three dimensions are discussed as central concerns designers and other food-sharing communities could learn from.
Beyond Food Provisioning: The Transformative Potential of Grassroots Innovation around Food
Agriculture
The newly-emerged ethical foodscape includes multiple expressions of innovation around food. With reference to the Italian context, this paper focuses on the transformative potential of the experiences of social innovation, innovative grassroots initiatives, which have been significantly contributed to shaping the food culture and production-consumption practices during the last two decades. While still consolidating their fundamentals and facing the challenge of growth, the networks behind them continue to be engaged in an effort of innovation, inside and outside their niche. The paper explores these dynamics. Understanding how these networks are managing their transformative capacity and what are the opportunities and challenges arising in the relation with the mainstream system may help to better capture and value the potential of this innovation niche, drawing useful lessons for fostering its expression and for a broader transition to more equitable and sustainable food systems.
Sustainability
Community food initiatives are gaining momentum. Across various geographical contexts, community food initiatives are self-organising, providing communities with inspiration, knowledge and the opportunity to work towards responsible and socially acceptable transformations in food systems. In this article, we explore how self-organisation manifests itself in the daily activities and developments of community food initiatives. Through the conceptual lens of community self-organisation, we aim to provide a more detailed understanding of how community food initiatives contribute to broader and transformational shifts in food systems. Drawing on a multi-method approach, including community-based participatory research, interviews and observations, this article follows the creation and creative dissolution of the Free Café—a surplus food sharing initiative in Groningen, the Netherlands, which in the eye of the public remains unified, but from the volunteers’ perspectives split up into thr...
Design and social innovation for systemic change: Creating social capital for a Farmers’ Market
Social innovation is a form of systemic change to society, and designers are key proponents of this approach. This paper describes how design interventions were used in the Izindaba Zokudla project that aims to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system in Soweto. The creation of the Soweto Imvelo Market by designers and researchers from Izindaba Zokudla, a local farmers’ organisation and other stakeholders identifies two aspects of social innovation that were instrumental in developing this alternative in the Johannesburg Food System: The creative contribution that designers can bring to social innovation and the need to socialise design into broader coalitions for change. The paper describes the socialisation of designers and their artefacts and technologies in terms of the theory of social capital which leads to specific recommendations on how methods should be used and how we should understand the interaction of design with social movements. The creative contributions designers make disrupts and transforms the ways we think of food, and this facilitates the socialisation of design in social innovation interventions. The paper makes recommendations from this analysis in order to guide further interventions by designers for social innovation.
Citizen way: Co-created citizen science meets convivial food design
International Journal of Food Design
This research approaches co-created citizen science from an interdisciplinary design perspective and is aligned with ideals of democratic and participatory co-creation of knowledge, its dissemination and implementation. We propose a new theoretical and practical design framework to be added to citizen science: convivial food system design. Convivial food system design is a new relational and tactical way to approach the development of a regenerative food system. Citizen science approaches can also benefit convivial food system design through activating communities of practice to share their insights and actively participate in co-food systems design processes. The integration of convivial food systems design and citizen science offers a deep, holistic and radical relation between amateur, civic and academic (scientific) knowledge in the production of alternatives to industrial food systems. This article shows the possibilities and potentials of this new conceptual integration throug...
INTRODUCTION TO FOOD AS A PARTICIPATORY TOOL FOR CO-CREATION IN DEALING WITH POWER DIFFERENCES
2024
User research played an important role by providing both tangible and intangible elements, essential for generating effective solutions to problems. However, traditional user research methods often extract mostly the tangible elements, neglecting the desire or the motivations of users, ultimately leading to monotony in solutions. Food, as a medium of expression, holds unique potential to break barriers during conversations. Integrating food design with other disciplines offers a more human-centric approach to resolving complex problems. This paper seeks to explore the introduction of food design in problem-solving and evaluate its effectiveness in facilitating collaborative decision-making among stakeholders, eventually leading to impactful outcomes. Drawing upon ongoing experience experiments conducted at Project Otenga Cafe in Ahmedabad, namely, 6 Strings & a Mouthful & Pet Pataka the paper adopts a community-engaged research-based confirmatory approach. Through 3 larger experiments, along with analogous research conducted over 16 weeks, the study aims to ascertain if the proposed topic is supported by data, thereby contributing to our understanding of the role of food design in the design problem-solving process. “The function of community-engaged research partnerships is to establish an effective infrastructure for translation of research out into the community (Ahmed, S. M., et al. (2015).