Interactions - March/April 2009

EDITOR
Eli Blevis
eblevis@indiana.edu

each garden, and hosts backyard dinners hosted by local chefs [4].

Slow food. Targeted at undoing the harms of a culture that consumes fast food, the slow food movement has seen an uptick in recent years. The website www.bigpicture.tv has several worthwhile videos that address the concept of slowness and the slow food movement [5].

digital divides is to connect families from different countries and cultures—”sister families” who can share knowledge, resources, and stories to create stronger understanding of cultures and practice, especially where food and land use practices are concerned.

Food exchange. In some communities, people
share produce by barter system, and such sys-
tems could be facilitated by digital technologies,
Interactive Technologies for Food, by more broadly identifying who in a community
Issues and Opportunities has which produce and is willing to participate, or
We can imagine a number of interactive technolo- allowing for some kind of credit-based exchange.
gies that may improve local food production or Such a system allows certain participants to spe-
promote more sustainable land use. Some of these cialize in particular crops, the need to minimize
technologies are now available or in development. the risk of encouraging monoculture land use not-
Still others are just ideas that represent oppor- withstanding.
tunities for innovations in the use of interactive Organic and fair-trade footprint calculators. Like the
technologies to promote organic food and land now ubiquitous carbon footprint calculators that
use practices. populate the Internet, organic and fair-trade foot-
Tracking food. Interactive technologies may be print calculators could allow motivated individu-
used for tracking the origins of foods. This may als to see their impact on others in terms of fair
be important information for consumers, and it is wages and responsible land use.
vital information for organic growers who want to Food-source monitoring. Like other retailers, local
certify that their products are organic. food co-ops need to comply with food source
Garden sensors. Garden sensors that help people monitoring regulations as a matter of food safety.
manage their planting better by allowing measure- Such information may be equally interesting to
ments of soil pH or temperatures or other aspects consumers who might like to know how local and
of the garden can be tied to computer applications organic the food they eat is.
that provide advice about what can be planted and SimOrganicFarm. Like its city-building counter-
when, and other helpful information [6]. part SimCity, SimFarm challenges gamers to build
Online communities. Like other aspects of online and maintain their own digital farm, complete
culture, Web-based communities can serve the with weather, pests, and problems that all threat-
needs of people who are interested in learning en the endeavor to become a successful farmer.
about gardening, urban farming, and permacul- The notion of SimOrganicFarm is the same idea
ture from one another. The advantage of online and opportunity for the urban farming and per-
communities in this context is that people can maculture movements.
share their knowledge and interests and create Satellite images, time-lapse imaging, and GIS.
community with others who are not physically Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely
collocated. Nonetheless, it is also a particularly available, but current forms, such as Google Earth,
important opportunity for bridging digital divide present a relatively static view. A more dynamic
in a bi-directional way, since knowledge of agricul- view, which shows changes in land use over short
tural is a resource that can be shared from poor to periods of time—weeks versus years—could
rich as well as from rich to poor. greatly inform and motivate the urban-farming
Grower management software. Several grower and permaculture communities. Such information
management software programs exist. Some are could lead to communities being able to advertise
targeted for use at personal scale to track prog- their progress in terms of increasing permaculture
ress in a personal garden. More are targeted for and other forms of sustainable land use, making
large-scale use, as is the case for local organic their towns seem more attractive as places to live.
farming operations.

[4] http://myfarmsf.com/ about.html

[5] Economist Manfred A. Max-Neef describes the notion of slowness as a healthy alternative way of being in this delightful video clip: http://www.bigpicture. tv/videos/watch/ e56954b4f. Erika Lesser also describes the slow food movement in these video clips: http://www. bigpicture.tv/videos/ watch/42a0e188f, http:// www.bigpicture.tv/vid- eos/watch/3988c7f88, and http://www. bigpicture.tv/videos/ watch/013d40716.