Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in living

TY - GEN

T1 - Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in living

AU - Chopra, Simran

AU - Clarke, Rachel E.

AU - Clear, Adrian K.

AU - Heitlinger, Sara

AU - Dilaver, Ozge

AU - Vasiliou, Christina

N1 - Funding Information: More recently, however, there have been signifcant funding cuts where projects and infrastructure have been taken away due to austerity measures and project-specifc funding from large funded projects coming to an end. This has also coincided with the closure of a local allotment site. Members continued to share tips and tricks, seeds, excess produce, equipment, recipes, preserves and prepared food, during face to face community meetups. Due to negligible funds, they moved to self-organise through the use of social media, emails, word-of-mouth and fyers to inform people about the events and to stay connected, share queries and videos. For example, a micro-business, “Grow-in Containers” was a part of a larger Green South project between 2013-18. After the funding cuts, they decided to continue with a program of small scale events including knowledge sharing and food growing meetups supported by a core volunteer group. Unsurprisingly, many residents were unhappy with funding cuts. Members voiced concerns regarding the challenges of access to infrastructure, limited fnan-cial resources, council support, growing space, uncertainty about growing food, wider engagement in the area, and time constraints as key challenges in their endeavour. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 ACM.

PY - 2022/4/29

Y1 - 2022/4/29

N2 - This paper responds to sustainable HCI's call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

AB - This paper responds to sustainable HCI's call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

KW - Food Growing

KW - Grassroots Communities

KW - Participatory Speculative Design

KW - Sustainability

KW - Visioning

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130565591&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3491102.3501929

DO - 10.1145/3491102.3501929

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85130565591

T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

BT - CHI 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

T2 - 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2022

Y2 - 30 April 2022 through 5 May 2022

ER -