Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

Our food system is a socio-material, heterogeneous infrastructure whose complexity and interconnectedness often remains invisible to citizens. While moments of crisis expose the vulnerabilities and injustices underlying this system, this paper seeks to explore which processes and tools CSCW could purposely design to 'open up' food infrastructures and bring young and adult people in contact with different aspects of the food system to cultivate food citizenship from a more-than-human perspective. Through a collaboration with a local primary school and four different food organisations (a mushroom grower, a vegetable farm, a bread-baking community centre, and a food bank) in North East England, UK, we designed 'contact zones' that enabled a class of students aged 7 to 8 years to encounter socio-material food practices at each partnering organisation's site and in the classroom. Our insights show young people's rich engagement in the socio-materiality of place, food, and practices; how encountering food practices across very different sites helped surface the interconnectedness of the food system; and how the contact zones opened spaces to practice food citizenship. The paper offers design implications towards infrastructuring more-than-human food pedagogies. It discusses inherent power dynamics of more-than-human design collaborations, critically evaluates the role of technology in more-than-human relations, and presents three design opportunities towards a relational understanding of food.

This paper discusses what infrastructuring in participatory design can contribute to processes of food system democratisation. It presents almost two years of engagement with a community-based organisation in a socio-economically deprived neighbourhood in England with the aim of developing a local food hub. It documents how the collaborative work shifted from setting up an infrastructure to ongoing infrastructuring of an enabling environment to grow and sustain social innovation. While the former focused on a technological platform and a business to deliver inclusivity, customer experience, and marketing, the latter focuses on building lasting relationships on three levels: strengthening ties within the community-based organisation, offering social spaces to connect with the local community, and with other organisations by forming coalitions with mutual benefits. We contribute three design opportunities: First, in order to infrastructure the formation of publics around food initiatives, we need to design for relationship building. Second, we point to design implications for ethical aspirations, participation, and system transformation towards a food democracy. Finally, we reflect on the sustainability of infrastructuring and the role of designers to work towards independent infrastructures.

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.

This paper presents a novel application of participatory design fiction for sustainable domestic energy consumption. In our study we examine how social practices relate to a newly developed energy management system introduced to households. We explore how design fiction can be used to identify current design limitations and to showcase future design directions to overcome these limitations. In particular, we investigated how energy consumption feedback is leaving users in a state of "helplessness" despite raising awareness of their environmental impact. Through participatory fictional future story-writing workshops we identified five levels of empowerment that design for sustainability practitioners can engage with. Our proposal is to use those levels of empowerment to reframe sustainable design by shifting from behaviour to social practices and from awareness to empowerment.

This paper presents a context-aware, personalised, persuasive (CPP) system design framework applicable to the sustainable transport field and other behaviour change support system domains. It operates on a situational, a user, and a target behaviour layer. Emphasis is placed on interlinking each layer's behaviour change factors for greater effectiveness. A prototype CPP system for more sustainable travel behaviour is introduced to demonstrate how the framework can be applied in practice.