Sustainable Communities through Digital Design


Field: Medieteknik
Project leader: Maria Normark
Starting year: 2015
Project type: Project

Urban farming makes a suitable case for investigating how values and ideas are shared, communicated and reproduced through digital platforms, since the political values are being practically acted out through changing the urban environment. By using values and norms as unit of analysis in relation to local context, we will be able to provide more nuanced and contrasting knowledge about how digital design is applied in sustainable lifestyles within the Baltic Sea rim. One assumption in the project is that there are significant local differences in meaning-making between the cities we will include in our studies, the role of growing food is very different depending on history of self-sufficiency, availability of food and what kinds of practices surrounding food that is considered privileged. The project will apply an ethnographic approach for studying use and interaction design that stimulate the interests of people in participating in urban farming communities. We will also further develop our reflections and analytic tools from our earlier research, adapting them to the context of urban farming and social movements online. We will shed light on and describe the practices of urban farmers in relation to digital media and also gather more knowledge about the digital functionalities that can support the development of grassroots movements and sustainable food communities online in relation to the Baltic Sea rim.