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Arctic food systems blend Traditional Ecological Knowledge with modern, often energy-intensive influences, triggered by colonization. Food systems’ future depends on alignment of tradition with innovation, facilitation of resilience and a heritage-driven interaction with the global economy – at a pace determined by local communities.

Participatory Research Through Design (pRtD) converges participatory design, embodied design and research through design, to critically and speculatively open experimental spaces of inquiry that support research participants to think through challenging issues by moving, making and doing. To enact pRtD, a researcher employs embodied, performative methods to engage participants in critical reflection and social critique through everyday activities, often defamiliarising these activities to support embodied engagement in creative play with research ideas and techniques, while the research is in process. The emphasis on process, rather than outcome, is critical to the power of pRtD as a methodology for transformative change-making. PRtD has been developed to support participant-led embodied-poetic engagement with matters of concern; rich discussions around possible futures; and consideration of broad potentialities of emerging propositions as they unfold. The approach diverges in important ways from Research through Design, and its emphasis on the research artefact. It builds out of the Scandinavian approach to participatory design, cocreation and codesign, finding relations in 'democratic participatory design practices' (Light, 2015) and 'experiments' (Binder et al., 2015) in that it is fundamentally political in its intentions and outcomes. It is also highly particular in its instantiations. With these legacies and orientations, pRtD resists being understood as a framework or reduced to a formula that might support replication. Rather, pRtD can be understood as a methodological stance that invites new understandings of the potentials of research through design, codesign, and research through co-design.

For HCI to move beyond human exceptionalism requires embracing more-than-humans, humans as parts of ecosystems, as multispecies assemblages and events. In short, decentering the human. Yet, human experience sits at the center of HCI. We report from Shit!, an experimental research inquiry into the relationship between people suffering intestinal dysbiosis and their gut microbiome. We discuss a series of Shitty workshops and the method’s suitability for fostering multiple-perspectives on human-microbiome relations. We reflect on the possibilities and challenges of conducting intimate, more-than-human design inquiries through workshops: carefully curated tasks undertaken collaboratively, in social settings, with facilitation. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we trace the lineage of workshops in HCI and Participatory Design; (2) we highlight and problematize human-microbiome relationships in sensitive participatory health-care contexts; (3) we deepen understanding of how workshops – as method – may be rearticulated in more-than-human design processes. We propose future directions in the work to extend and supplement the efficacy of the workshop with self-experimentation kits. Rather than developing design research methods anew, we argue the necessity of inquiring into and experimenting with the workshop as an established design method in HCI to prompt a re-articulation of situated knowledges and allow multiple voices, perspectives, and species to flourish.

Commensality is the feeling of fellowship when eating at the table with others. In a research context, commensality unveils dimensions of social relations between people, as well as human and non-human actors. We present an example of co-creating commensality, enacted with members of a local sustainable mar- ket association around their Annual General Meeting (AGM). We devised a suite of activities that we believed would generate social and cultural significance for the association members, as a pathway to fostering change. These activities used food as a design material, as well as research concern, and included: an inspirational talk by the CEO of a local vegan business; a mapping, envisioning and backcasting exercise; and a co-created dinner following the AGM. A driving intention in designing these activities was to support participants to leverage comensality as a way of infrastructure their development as agents of change.

Data in Design and HCI research is often associated with something captured from the world in digital form and transferred to a database. However, the assumption of digitalisation, as well as the intentions and values underlying it, can obscure more nuanced approaches to data, and is becoming increasingly criticised (e.g., through notions of data colonialism, data extractivism, etc.). In this workshop, we invite participants to critically review data concepts and practices that sustain Western industrialised socio-economic systems, considering their ethical, environmental, and ecological implications. In contrast, we will explore data in the entangled ecologies of organisms, matter, and environments, focusing on 'livingness' as a way to reveal embodied, relational, and situated aspects of data. Through wandering and foraging, we will discuss how these aspects of data might help us regain our attentiveness, appreciation, and responsibility towards more-than-human ecologies, and ultimately reframe concepts of data in the world.

A major challenge in ensuring that food system transformation is coherent across scales of concern is triangulating between real-world practices, data interpretation, and governance decision-making. In response to this challenge, we present emerging experiments in making food systems data digestible, using food not only as the subject of the research, but as a socio-culturally, environmentally and politically impactful design material. Using food to co-construct edible data physicalisations enables us to bring diverse stakeholders to a shared table, to leverage social and hedonic aspects of communal eating and situated expertise, and create openings for new understandings of the data, its interpretations and impacts. As we will demonstrate, co-development of edible data physicalisations makes visible divergent understandings of the data, as well as impacts of diverse data readings. It does this through an evolving negotiation of the ways that tangible representations of data might be understood, involving people’s sensing, socio-cultural bodies in a cross-sectoral meaning-making process. We present the outcomes of a workshop in which designers, chefs, fishermen of diverse genders, governance actors, economists, food studies scholars and data scientists co-create edible data physicalisations to represent historic and contemporary changes in fishing practices in the Baltic Sea. The resulting meals bring focus to the interplay between real-world practices; data selection, collection, presentation and interpretation; and governance decision-making in new ways. We hope this novel approach to data representation and engagement opens new opportunities for advancing the development of Arctic marine food systems policies and practices.

Physicalising data affords new kinds of interaction that open opportunities for meaning making. In our research, we consider how using food as the material for data physicalisation might expand the impact of this emerging field of practice in relation to Food System transformation. Food is sensorially rich, culturally and politically potent, and environmentally impactful; its resonance may be felt keenly at a range of scales from the personal and situated, to the systemic and global. To examine the impact of using food to construct data, we discuss three examples: i) the launch of a public Food Lab; ii) a temporary installation focused on food waste and sustainability; and iii) a short design research masters project on food and sustainable futures. Across these cases food acts as icebreaker, prompt for new thinking and sustenance, as well as a potent vehicle for design experimentation. In examining them, we unfold the ways that using food as data may make data more digestible, and thus more impactful, for different contexts and actors.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

In this study, we examine how 16 initiatives across Europe are addressing ‘wicked’ food system issues by mobilising local networks and implementing small-scale but impactful changes in urban and peri-urban regions. To map the potential of these initiatives to contribute to large-scale change, we apply the Small Wins Framework proposed by Termeer & Dewulf (2019). By analysing data collected through interviews with participants working on initiatives spanning 13 cities across 9 European countries, we identify the manifestation of six propelling mechanisms that signal the capacity of small wins to bring about systemic change. Findings from this study reveal the presence of most mechanisms across the included initiatives. However, the ways in which these mechanisms appear depend on various factors such as stakeholder motivation, the maturity of the initiative, the need for additional funding, local food culture, and the regional and national political landscape among others. Our analysis indicates that the Small Wins Framework could be successfully used as a mapping tool in urban transformation processes, but it is likely to be more effective as a tool for reflexive monitoring rather than ex-post evaluation. Drawing on the impacts of various large-scale disruptions on the initiatives, we suggest that social, political, and economic shocks can present windows of opportunity to accelerate change and that initiatives performing well under such pressure should be supported in their pursuit of systems transformation. Lastly, we recommend non-linear growth strategies such as spreading, deepening, and expanding, as ways to compound the impact of small wins.

In this chapter, we consider our symbiotic relationships with our gut microbiome and how these relationships are increasingly serving as a site for experimental design. We briefly overview existing work at the intersection of design and microbes, then turn to our case: the Shit! project, an inquiry into the methodological challenges of designing with microbes. Through experimental activities, such as gut drawings, performing the inner workings of the gastrointestinal tract and fashioning probiotic cakes with the semblance of one’s fæces, we consider material and collaborative explorations of human-microbe relationships, and what it might engender to invite participants to engage with themselves as multi-species events; as part of the planetary ecosystem. This engagement personifies, through practice with others, an embodied engagement with the materiality of what is at stake. The Shit! project embodies an evolving inquiry into the role of method in opening up new spaces for design, and exemplifies an emerging approach to more-than-human design in practice.