A grand challenge for HCI

Abstract

This year, at the ACM CHI Conference, we gathered as a group of HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners, to reflect on our role in designing sustainable food systems [6]. Designing sustainable food systems is a challenge that involves all parts and actors of the food system [5], including: 1) production and agriculture, 2) processing and manufacturing, 3) wholesale and logistics, 4) retail and food services, 5) purchasing and consumption and 6) waste management. Fifteen participants represented and discussed ongoing investigations into designing technologies for food and sustainability [1]. We reconsidered the role of waste, the potential for food to be used as medicine, the repercussions of antibiotic resistance, the pervasiveness of poverty, and the tensions between local and global systems. The workshop culminated in a design session focused on techniques and paradigms for future components of a sustainable food system. Designing sustainable food systems, including the socio-technical systems that work towards that ideal, is key to producing stable climates, societies, and economies. The ongoing and future changes in climate, food security, and socioeconomic issues are further complicated by a tenuous geopolitical context. Given this reality, it is imperative that we are deliberate in our design of food system components and supporting technologies so that we can better contribute to the sustainability of our food system.

Seven HCI Grand Challenges

“…Climate rules and ecological limits in terms of natural resources, should also be taken into account towards proofing the future (Knowles et al, 2018). The population explosion, as well as food sustainability constitute points of concern too (Norton et al, 2017). To address this, HCI can contribute throughout the process, by mapping requirements stemming from the analysis to design ideas and solutions.…”

Implications of Grassroots Sustainable Agriculture Community Values on the Design of Information Systems

“…The research described here crosses boundaries between computing and farming, food, and sustainability activism. Food-CHI has some overlap with Sustainable-HCI, such as in the context of those exploring and designing components of or entire sustainable food systems, e.g., [36,42,60,62]. The subset of the sustainable food-centered research in HCI that focuses on supporting people who grow food demonstrates the unique sets of values food growers maintain in their practice, the translation of those values into the information technologies appropriate, and the challenges of maintaining those values in the technologies we design for food growers.…”

“…A team of HCI researchers discovered they inadvertently created an information power dynamic in which farmers provided their operational data (i.e., relinquishing ownership) to cooperative technicians via a tool to better understand their own immediate production costs but were not aware of ways that the technicians were using their data, in conjunction with other farmers' data, within the cooperative [45]; this issue was addressed in a second iteration design [46]. Given the collective findings of the ongoing explorations into sustainable food research, HCI researchers asserted that the paradigms and practices of HCI research risk perpetuating the unsustainability of food and agriculture systems [62].…”

Feeding the World with Data

“…Sustainable HCI has shifted from its early focus on persuasive design to a more holistic systems perspective [25,17]. HCI researchers have unpacked the role of technology and design in creating more sustainable food systems at all points in the food chain [35,10]. Reporting on fieldwork with local food networks, Prost et al [42] propose food democracy as a theoretical framing for HCI work that engages with food systems, and they suggest six principles to guide food system change.…”