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7. Thomas, V., Remy, C., and Bates, O. The limits of HCD: Reimagining the anthropocentricity of ISO 9241-210.

Proc. of the 2017 Workshop on Computing Within Limits, 85–92; https://doi. org/10.1145/3080556.3080561

8. Thomas, V., Remy, C., Hazas, M., and Bates, O. HCI and environmental public policy: Opportunities for engagement.

Proc. of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 6986–6992; https://doi. org/10.1145/3025453.3025579

Juliet Norton is an informatics Ph.D. candidate at UC Irvine. She researches grassroots agroecology and information technology.

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Ankita Raturi recently completed her Ph.D. in software engineering at UC Irvine on modeling sustainable agriculture.

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Bonnie Nardi is a professor at UC Irvine.

Her latest book is Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism.

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Sebastian Prost is a doctoral trainee at Open Lab, Newcastle University, U.K., researching digital technologies for sustainable food systems.

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Samantha McDonald is a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine studying information technology, sustainability, and political communication.

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Daniel Pargman is an associate professor in the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) at K TH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

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Oliver Bates researches infrastructure and practice redesign to mitigate growing environmental impacts at Lancaster University.

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Maria Normark is an associate professor in media technology at Södertörn University, Sweden. She researches societal values and gender issues related to interaction design.

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Bill Tomlinson is a professor at UC Irvine studying sustainability and information technology.

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Nico Herbig researches cognition-aware UIs as a Ph.D. candidate at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarland Informatics Campus.

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Lynn Dombrowski is an assistant professor in human-computer interaction at Indiana University – Purdue University – Indianapolis (IUPUI).

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food trends indicate there is consumer interest in local food production and in small-scale farming, which is interpreted as a sign of quality. In the wake of this interest, people in urban areas are rediscovering practices of growing food and producing vegetables and fruits. This renewed interest can help people connect to what they eat and understand the kinds of resources and complex processes that are required to put food on the table.

Constraints. Understanding the legal, regulatory, and social constraints we must work within is imperative.

Many practices in the food system are enforced by policy and social norms. We can discover how to design sustainable food systems within political and social constraints. We have to be mindful that those constraints may, perhaps unintentionally, influence our designs toward more unsustainable practices.

Also, this means that we cannot design something that moves toward an ideal sustainable food system but is not legally or socially supported without facing significant pushback. We should also recognize that the makeup of local political and social systems will yield additional and often unique constraints for sustainable food systems.

CONCLUSION

As HCI researchers, we can begin
to engage with issues in food +
sustainability by exploring food systems
on land and at sea, across cultures
and generations, that present us with
challenges that need to be addressed at
global and multi-generational scales. To
achieve this agenda, we must include
the views and voices of diverse global
populations to aid in the development
of a representative knowledge base
of challenges and solutions in the
food systems at different scales and
in different geographies. The impact
of catastrophic events (e.g., scarcity,
climate, disease) on food systems and
responses in other parts of the world
(e.g., problems with crop yield and
supply chain, poverty and famine)
has largely been invisible to food
systems in parts of North America and
Europe. These challenges and events
provide the backdrop for considering
future scenarios for sustainable
food systems supported by digital
technology, including uncertain and
unpredictable climates, untrustworthy
business models and supply chains, and
challenges around increasing poverty
and social injustice. By mapping these
challenges and events to the roles of
digital technology, we will be able to
make a start on HCI’s journey into the
design and development of sustainable
food systems across populations, lands,
oceans, and generations.

This article is our first step toward developing a new food + sustainability research agenda in HCI. We call on the community to take on the themes of sustainable food that challenge the paradigms and norms of technology. We must continue to challenge poverty and enable food sovereignty globally, push for new policies, and work on understanding and reconfiguring the trust and power in the relationships in the food system. Designing a sustainable food system is no simple feat. It is an ever-changing challenge that spans human and physical geographies, and surpasses a single lifespan. Our current understanding in HCI, then, must grow and continuously evolve.

 

Endnotes

1. Raturi, A., Norton, J., Tomlinson, B., Blevis, E., and Dombrowski, L. Designing sustainable food systems. Proc. of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2017, 609–616; https://doi. org/10.1145/3027063.3027075

2. Nesheim, M.C., Oria, M., and Yih, P. T., eds. A Frame work for Assessing Effects of the Food System. National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2015; http://www.nap. edu/catalog/18846

3. Raturi, A., Norton, J., Tomlinson, B., Blevis, E., and Dombrowski, L. Designing Sustainable Food Systems. 2017; http:// www.foodchi.org

4. Blevis, E. and Coleman Morse, S. Food, dude. Interactions 16, 2 (2009), 58–62; https:// doi.org/10.1145/1487632.1487646

5. Leshed, G., Håkansson, M., and Kaye, J.J. “Our life is the farm and farming is our life”: Home-work coordination in organic farm families. Proc. of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 2014, 487–498; https://doi. org/10.1145/2531602.2531708

6. McCune, N., Rosset, P.M., Cruz Salazar, T., Morales, H., and Saldívar Moreno, A. The long road: Rural youth, farming and agroecological formación in Central America. Mind, Culture, and Activity 24, 3 (2017), 183–198; https://doi.org/10.1080/

 

DOI: 10.1145/3137095 COP YRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00