HCI has studied food practices and speculative food futures, and drawn on tools to support, for example, decision-making and participatory futuring in relation to food. However, there is little understanding of how quantitatively-grounded tools like interactive simulation models can mediate collaborative reasoning about large-scale food futures. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how interactive models that simulate food production can mediate how stakeholders think about and collaboratively negotiate sustainable and healthy food systems. We designed and developed an interactive crop and livestock model as a technology probe to allow UK food system stakeholders to explore the impacts of changing the configuration of the food production landscape in their region. We deployed it as part of the mediation of two workshops where stakeholders deliberated about future food systems to understand participant interactions with and experiences of it. As well as the design of the technology probe, we contribute an analysis of these workshops and present a preliminary set of guidelines for designing systems to support future thinking about food systems.

One of the most intractable challenges currently facing agricultural systems is the need to produce sufficient food for all to enjoy a healthy balanced diet while minimising impacts to the environment. Balancing these competing goals is especially intractable because most food systems are not locally bounded. This study aims to investigate the likely impacts on production, profit and the environment that result from aligning food systems to a healthy diet, as defined by EAT-Lancet. For this, we consider two distinct areas of the UK, one in East Anglia and the other in South Wales. These two regions reflect different ecosystems and therefore differing specialisations in UK agriculture. We used the Rothamsted Landscape Model (a detailed agroecosystems process-based model) to predict soil carbon dynamics, nutrient flows and crop production for the dominant crops grown in these regions, and the IPCC inventory models to estimate emissions from six livestock systems. Two scenarios were considered. One in which the study regions had to meet healthy diet requirements independently of each other and another in which they could do so collectively. To map their production to healthy diets, both study areas require increases in the production of plant proteins and reductions in the production of red meat. While changes in production can feed more people a healthy diet compared to the business-as-usual state, the overall calories produced reduces dramatically. Emissions and leaching decrease under the healthy diet scenarios and pesticide impacts remain largely unchanged. We show that local infrastructure and environment have a bearing on how “localised” food systems can be without running into substantial constraints. Whilst isolation of the farming system to a regional level, as explored here, is unlikely to be practical, we nevertheless demonstrate that aligning agricultural production towards healthier diets can generate food systems with many associated benefits in terms of agroecosystems' health and resilience to shocks in the food supply chain.

Background: Monitoring indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is important to better understand occupant health. Passive IEQ monitoring with digital technologies may provide insightful quantitative data to better inform, e.g., health interventions. Yet, many traditional approaches with known IEQ technologies have limited utility due to high costs or coarse granularity—focusing on the collective rather than individuals. Equally, subjective approaches (e.g., manual surveys) have poor adherence (i.e., are burdensome). There is a need for holistic IEQ measurement techniques that are sustainable (affordable, i.e., low-cost) and personalised. Here, the aim of this case report is to explore the use of low-cost digital approaches to gather personalised quantitative and qualitative data. Methods: This study deploys a personalised monitoring approach with IEQ devices coupled to wearables, weather data, and qualitative data, captured through a post-study interview. Results: The mixed-method, single-case approach gathered data continuously for six months with a reduced burden, by using digital technologies to affirm environmental factors, which were subjectively evaluated by the participant. Quantitative data reinforced qualitative data, removing the need for generalising qualitative findings against a collective. Conclusions: This study showed that the single-case, mixed-method approach used here can provide a holistic approach not previously obtainable with traditional pen-and-paper techniques alone. The use of a low-cost multi-modal device linked with common home and wearable technology suggest a contemporary and sustainable IEQ measurement approach that could inform future work to better determine occupant health.

This work responds to isolating urban places, and contributes new ways for thinking about placemaking. Progressing through autoethnography and prototyping, we critique design proposals with Lefebvre’s theory of utopia. There inhabitants can enjoy and shape their place together without risking depletion of their abilities and motivations to do so. The critique produces political sensibilities that help us make sense of common tensions among inhabitants, landowners, and visitors, and generate possible responses. The critique process itself illustrates how designing through critique with theory can help us think in new ways. This paper contributes a display of how design with critical theory can happen, ultimately to support our abilities and motivations to envision and make places of social flourishing that can respond to our socio-environmental crises.

Globally, about 21–37% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to food systems. Dietary-related non-communicable diseases have increased significantly from 1990–2019 at a global scale. To achieve carbon emissions targets, increase resilience, and improve health there is a need to increase the sustainability of agricultural practises and change dietary habits. By considering these challenges together and focusing on a closer connection between consumers and sustainable production, we can benefit from a positive interaction between them. Using the 2019 EAT Lancet Commission dietary guidelines, this study analysed interview data and food diaries collected from members of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes and the wider UK population. By comparing the environmental sustainability and nutritional quality of their respective diets, we found that CSA members consumed diets closer to the EAT Lancet recommendations than controls. We identified significant differences in daily intakes of meat; dairy; vegetables; legumes; and sugar, and the diets of CSA members emitted on average 28% less CO2 compared to controls. We propose that agricultural and wider social and economic policies that increase the accessibility of CSAs for a more diverse demographic could support achieving health, biodiversity, and zero-emission policy targets.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes (programs) provide an alternative means for obtaining produce, through direct purchase from farms. They are also often driven by a vision of transforming the current mainstream food system and seek to build a community of people who support this vision. Social capital refers to the networks and ties between people and groups and the impact of these ties on access to influence, information, opportunity, and ability to organize. Social capital is built by CSAs and helps foster and stabilize the grassroots agricultural innovations that are needed for the development of sustainable food systems. Using the concept of social capital, we studied communication methods of four CSAs in the UK, examining the interactions between CSAs and their members and within each of their membership groups. We carried out in-depth interviews with 49 CSA members to establish what interactions they had with their CSA and with other members, and analyzed our data thematically to identify the characteristics of interactions that were important to participants. We consider how our research may benefit CSA organizations by enabling them to learn what their members want and to learn about the varied ways in which members conceptualize their experiences of community derived from their membership. We found that the various CSA communication strategies, which consist of frequent and varying virtual and face-to-face interactions, are able to promote development of both bridging and bonding social capital. Overall, there is a desire for social connection in CSA memberships. Furthermore, in CSAs where members can interact easily, there is potential for CSA membership to provide members with communication that is important as a source of both knowledge and social connection. CSAs can maximize both social capital and member satisfaction by using a range of communication media and methods to meet their members' circumstances and preferences.

The home has been the subject of investigation in the social sciences and interaction design communities for decades. This has been driven not least by a wish to understand technology, energy demand, and how it might be understood in terms of social practices. In this paper, we reflect on several studies that have sought to capture this relationship. We introduce an evolving methodological approach we term 'Resource Trace Interviewing' that extends interview practice using visualizations of fine-grained quantitative data from sensors and software deployed in the home. By facilitating fuller accounts and joint sense-making between participants and researchers, this method better reveals the patterns of technology and energy use in the digitally connected home, and how this in turn relates to domestic practices. We reflect, for the first time, on the strengths and limitations of this approach as a guide to others studying similar socio-technical settings.

This paper responds to the challenges faced by grassroots sustainability communities in addressing ecological issues, through local action. Now more than ever, designers must fully engage with the messy side of these collaborative practices as we strive to support and sustain socio-political actions to foster more sustainable ecological futures connected to wider landscapes of socio-political change. We report on a community food growing project, as an example of sustainability research within Participatory Design demonstrating the complexity of such engagements when working through relationships across local and global concerns. We focus on infrastructuring place-based actions of the community, connecting these to the broader socio-political and economic landscapes. We contribute a multi-scalar perspective to speculative participatory workshops to connect everyday ecological food practices and imagined futures to socio-political realities across micro, meso, and macro scales. The workshops surfaced how socio-material complexities shape imaginations for sustainability and relational civic agency for situated change.

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.

Buildings account for approximately 40% of the energy consumption across the European Union, so there is a requirement to strive for better energy performance to reduce the global impact of urbanised societies. However, energy performant buildings can negatively impact building occupants (e.g., comfort, health and/or wellbeing) due to a trade-off between airtightness and air circulation. Thus, there is a need to monitor Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) to inform how it impacts occupants and hence redefine value within building performance metrics. An individualised study design would enable researchers to gain new insights into the effects of environmental changes on individuals for more targeted e.g., health interventions or nuanced and improved building design(s). This paper presents a protocol to conduct longitudinal monitoring of an individual and their immediate environment. Additionally, a novel approach to environmental perception gathering is proposed that will monitor environmental factors at an individual level to investigate subjective survey data pertaining to the participant’s perceptions of IEQ (e.g., perceived air quality, thermal conditions, light, and noise). This protocol has the potential to expose time-differential phenomena between environmental changes and an individual’s behavioural and physiological responses. This could be used to support building performance monitoring by providing an interventional assessment of building performance renovations. In the future it could also provide building scientists with a scalable approach for environmental monitoring that focuses specifically on individual health and wellbeing.

Configuring community technology to ensure its sustainability has proved challenging. We present a 3-year longitudinal study and evaluation of two independent situated community display networks in rural contexts. We describe how the design of the display systems evolved to reflect the needs and desires of the community. We report on the way stakeholders’ perceptions of the displays changed over time, and examine the community dynamics involved in the administration, maintenance and moderation of the systems. Drawing from our findings, we further explore the role of the community champion and their impact on sustainability and scalability. We provide recommendations for the design of community network display technology that supports democratic inter-community politics and governance, and is sensitive to the hidden emotional labor and social resources that are required from communities to fully adopt and sustain display technology.

Free-living assessment and remote monitoring is important for healthcare researchers. Moving research beyond the laboratory provides habitual environments for remote assessment that allows research to remain agile even when facing uncontrollable external factors e.g., the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. Emergent technologies have the potential to make this form of assessment feasible by providing accessible and affordable mechanisms for conducting free-living research. This paper presents findings from a study that was halted due to the pandemic, but this work highlighted a series of challenges that may present themselves to researchers conducting similar work. By transparently reporting the challenges and solutions rather than just methods, it is hoped that the lessons learned from this study could provide researchers with greater awareness in future studies.

BackgroundDiets in high-income countries such as the UK are generally both unhealthy and unsustainable, contributing to climate change and an escalating prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Community supported agriculture schemes (CSAs) present a promising sustainable alternative to large-scale intensive monoculture farming. Our study aimed to explore this potential by investigating whether CSA members' diets are more environmentally sustainable, and of higher nutritional quality, than those of community controls.MethodsThis mixed methods study involved 113 participants drawn from four UK CSA schemes and the wider population. Adult male and female CSA participants were recruited through collaboration with four CSA organisations. Controls were recruited by approaching shoppers outside local supermarkets. Participants undertook semi-structured interviews exploring household food culture, food practices, and socioeconomic characteristics, and completed 3-day food diaries. Dietary quality was assessed by comparison with 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission dietary guidelines, and greenhouse gas emissions were used to indicate environmental sustainability. Intra-participant data were integrated by comparing responses through triangulation. Ethics approval was granted by Cardiff University, and participants provided written consent.Findings46 participants were recruited to the CSA group and 67 to the control group. CSA members had higher mean annual household income (£35 254 [SD 11 269·04] vs £27 115 [10 135·97]) and were more likely to be vegan (six [13%] vs one [1%]) or vegetarian (three [7%] vs two [3%]) than controls. CSA members' dietary intake was associated with 28% reduction in mean greenhouse gas emissions compared with controls (2995 g [SD 2035] vs 3823 g [2501] of CO2 equivalent). CSA participants also consumed diets adhering more closely to EAT-Lancet dietary guidelines: CSA members consumed significantly fewer calories from meat (46 vs 121 kcal/day, p=0·029) and dairy (205 vs 284 kcal/day, p=0·065), and more from vegetables (93 vs 43 kcal/day, p=0·001) and legumes (42 vs 19 kcal/day, p=0·077), than did controls. Mean caloric intake did not differ between groups (CSA group 1655 kcal/day, control group 1737 kcal/day; p=0·56). Ten CSA participants (22%) reported eating more healthily since joining the scheme.InterpretationOur results indicate that policies widening participation in CSAs may present a small-scale opportunity to enhance the environmental sustainability and healthfulness of UK diets. Conclusions are limited by the observational study design, and potentially biased characteristics of CSA participants.FundingUK Research and Innovation (grant BBSRC Award BB/S014292/1).

Digital water transformation is often written about as though universally desirable and inevitable, capable of addressing the multifaceted socioecological challenges that water systems face. However, there is not widespread reflection on the complexities, tensions and unintended consequences of digital transformation, its social and political dimensions are often neglected. This article introduces case studies of digital water development, bringing examples of technological innovation into dialogue with literature and empirical research from across the social sciences. We examine how Big Data affects our observations of water in society to shape water management, how the Internet of Things becomes involved in reproducing unjust water politics, how digital platforms are entangled in the varied sociocultural landscape of everyday water use, and how opensource technologies provide new possibilities for participatory water governance. We also reflect on regulatory developments and the possible trajectories of innovation resulting from public-private sector interactions. A socially and politically informed view of digital water is essential for just and sustainable development, and the gap between industry visions of digital water and research within the social sciences is inhibitive. Thus, the analysis presented in this article provides a novel, pluralistic perspective on digital water development and outlines what is required for more inclusive future scholarship, policy and practice. This article is categorized under: Human Water

Monitoring Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) is of growing interest for health and wellbeing. New building standards, climate targets and adoption of homeworking strategies are creating needs for scalable, monitoring solutions with onward Cloud connectivity. Low-cost Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors have potential to address these needs, enabling development of bespoke multimodal devices. Here, we present insights into the development of a MEMS-based Internet of things (IoT) enabled multimodal device for IEQ monitoring. A study was conducted to establish the inter-device variability and validity to reference standard sensors/devices. For the multimodal, IEQ monitor, intraclass correlations and Bland-Altman analyses indicated good inter-sensor reliability and good-to-excellent agreement for most sensors. All low-cost sensors were found to respond to environmental changes. Many sensors reported low accuracy but high precision meaning they could be calibrated against reference sensors to increase accuracy. The multimodal device developed here was identified as being fit-for-purpose, providing general indicators of environmental changes for continuous IEQ monitoring.

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management.

The futuristic visions, infrastructures, and developments of smart cities continue to gather pace, with municipal authorities and businesses in the UK investing increasing amounts of resources into their manifestation. At the same time local communities continue to be hard hit by austerity, with more local services being affected by government cuts, with the North-East of England being particularly affected. In this paper we report on a case study that aimed to explore how the top-down, technocentric, and corporate visions of smart cities stand in contrast to the reality of grassroots communities who are dealing with the consequences of austerity. Our case study focuses on a community of urban food growers. We describe our speculative and participatory approach that we devised for co-designing "smart" urban food-growing futures from the bottom-up with local residents in a deprived neighbourhood of Newcastle upon Tyne, and reflect on how they elicited realities and future visions that stand as a counterpoint to the corporate visions of future cities.

This paper describes Showboater, a simple system architecture for rural community display networks. We outline the context of our 2-year longitudinal study and outline five design goals: a functional, sustainable, scalable, resilient networked display solution which affords roles for the distribution of governance. We describe the design and implementation of Showboater and how it aligns to the design goals, as well as describing two separate deployments. We reflect on evaluation feedback and provide insight into the implications of deploying Showboater as rural community display system, respective of the initial design goals, and present our recommendations for future improvements.

Emissions arising from the production and consumption of food are acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change. From a consumer’s perspective, however, the sustainability of food may have many meanings: it may result from eating less meat, becoming vegetarian, or choosing to buy local or organic food. To explore what food sustainability means to consumers, and what factors lead to changes in food practice, we adopt a sociotechnical approach to compare the food consumption practices in North West England with two differing consumer groups. The first, supermarket shoppers ‘embedded’ in the mainstream food regime; and the second, who self-identify as sustainable food practitioners, and who perform a range of sustainable food consumption practices. We examine how our two groups experience changes in food practices and identify ‘fractures’ stemming from lifecourse and public events that emerge as points where change might occur. We suggest that ‘sharing spaces’ would be one possibility for prompting and nurturing fractures that can lead to greater sustainability in food practices.