Fo od
1. SEEDING
Communities Design
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[to furnish with something that grows or stimulates growth or development]
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In “Seeding” I will introduce you to food and urban farming as the main theme of my project, and how it connects to communities and design. I will also talk about where I come from as a designer, what I have become interested in, and why I want to start working with social and environmental issues. Important things – ideas, inspiration and knowledge have been «seeded» in me during my two master years, and this is what this book will be about.
End user
Client
DESIGNING FOR WHO? I entered the master with a vision of bringing women and men closer to the natural ecosystems we belong to. By becoming “urban animals” I felt we cared less and less about the planet we were hurting. I discovered serious problems that demanded my attention, and most of all the environmental challenges that we have to solve. How could design help in this matter? I started to think about these issues while I was studying my bachelor in furniture design and interior architecture. I could not accept that I should only design for huge industries and defined markets, when there was so many other important things to do. Why weren’t anyone caring about saving the world? When I entered the master course at Oslo National Academy of the Arts I had no clue of what I could do. A five-weeks course we had the first semester changed my direction. It said that design could work with social issues, and create social change – finally something resonated with my way of thinking. Simultaneously I discovered how food is one of the most fundamental parts of our culture. Eating is obviously a the basic of being a human and animal as a part of natures ecosystems Surely a powerful tool when working with society and environmental challenges. With this in mind I started to explore how I could work as a designer.
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«Once you start to see the world through food, everything changes. (...) Food as we know, is one of the greatest forces of the world. So why not use it to shape the world better?» –Carolyn Steel
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SUSTAINABLE FOOD – IN CITIES I had discovered the magic of food and how it could reconnect us with nature and each other. But I realized quite soon that by starting to work with and researching the field of food and the food system, I had entered one of the most complex and important challenges we face today. The world’s population is growing rapidly, as well as the over all living standards, and it takes a lot of valuable resources to feed every single one of us. The food system we have today is a big, international industry, having large, negative social, environmental and economical impacts in both industrial and development countries (see pages 14-15). It is making both life and health worse for many, and better only for a few percent. Nature suffers too, because of the abuse of resources and pollution as well as damaging its biodiversity. It is not a sustainable system, and it evolves in only one direction. Despite this obvious harmfulness there is a common understanding in politics and consumer markets that we need this system to feed the whole, demanding world with all its present and future needs. In the near future most of the worlds population is going to live in cities, so it would be reasonable to consider growing more food in urban areas. This idea has already taken off on a global scale, and is called urban farming. Rooftops, parks, parking lots and other urban plots are turning into farming solutions that serve the eager hands and mouths of urban citizens. Detroit, New York, Berlin, London are all cities where growing 9
food is becoming a common sight. Also in Oslo there is a growing interest for this, for instance the queues for community gardens has grown rapidly. Many small and medium size projects have emerged the last couple of years, and 4000 people signed up for getting 150 5 m2 of crates in Bjørvika (see page 18-19) Tests in Oslo has also proven that the soil here is safe to grow food in, and that air pollution is not drawn in to the plants, and can be washed off before use (Joner, 2013). Growing food in the city has been done since the city of Jericho, 12 000 years ago. Carolyn Steel writes about this (Steel, 2011). As soon as we learned how to cultivate land, we started to civilize and build cities. It has always been important to have easy access to food, so the farming was for a long time organized close to the cities. The cities also gave back to the farming in form of sewerage systems. When industrialization came, and cities grew bigger, so did the distance to nature – we were able to cultivate more land, further away from the city, feeding the growing population, until we ended up where we are today. There is no doubt that if urban farming goes big scale, it will have a big impact. But unfortunately todays indoor growing methods are too energy consuming. It is actually better for the environment if we import tomatoes from outside of Norway, than growing them here, in greenhouses (Bilden, 2013). Soon we will reach “Peak oil” (Hopkins, 2008), which will force us to rethink completely how we use fossil energy. Is industrial farming ready for this? Others suggest we need to consider the system as a whole to make the food system sustainable. A project initiated by the European Union in 2012 as a part of the umbrella project UrbAct, has the goal of finding more holistic solutions for food in European cities, where Oslo is one of ten. The others are Vaslui (Romania), Aarhus (Denmark), Brussels (Belgium), Lyon (France), Gothenburg (Sweden), Ourense (Spain), Athens (Greece), 10
AL IC
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equitable
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ENVIRONMENTAL
PEOPLE
PLANET
PROFIT
The food system is not fully considering people and planet, but mostly profit. To be more sustainable it has to consider all three as much as the “Tripple Bottom Line” describes.
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ﾂｫUrban farming is a way of living, it is a way of eating, and it is a way of taking care of and live with natureﾂｻ 窶的dun Bjerkvik Leinaas
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Amersfoort (Netherlands), Messina (Italy). This project categorizes four basic themes of the food system: Growing, delivering, enjoying and waste. E.g. “Coop” solutions for delivering goods directly from the farmer to the consumer are well established in some European countries. It has emerged also in Norway: Oslo Kooperativ was launched spring 2013. There are also being done governmental research projects dealing with waste. One solution is to produce our food more locally and small-scale. This forces the production process to be more transparent, as well as cutting down the carbon and water footprint. It also secures higher quality and healthier products. Of course, this is not a new way of thinking at all, and many are growing food locally all around the globe, only they are considered poor because they are not buying their food on the supermarket. It has also been proven possible to mobilize big scale changes like we maybe need now. During World War II, the United States developed a food production program called “Victory Gardens”. A similar program was used in United Kingdom: “Dig for Victory!”. These programs were simply the public producing their own food and distributing it between them. It was nonetheless a huge system that probably prevented a hunger catastrophe. San Fransisco alone had around 70.000 Victory Gardens by the end of the War (McKay, 2011). But there are of course arguments that these kinds of solutions will create huge losses of markets and jobs. It is impossible to find single right or wrong answers or solutions to the challenge of the food system. It has many different stakeholder agendas and can thus be classified as a “wicked problem”. A part of the problem is also that it is hard for politics to take action, because of the systems largeness and complexity. All though, as in UrbAct, they are taking steps towards changing it, they are suffering under bureaucratic slowness and are lacking action oriented solutions – the result of the UrbAct project will only be a document from each city named “Action Plan”. It this enough to save the world?
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OUR WICKED F It produces enough food (or in fact more) than there is people on the planet. It is safe because of e.g. governmental regulations and date and origin labelling. It creates a large freedom of choice in what to buy. It makes food cheap. Consumers do not have to think about how the food is produced, transported, stored and sold, we can just buy it in the store and focus on other things.
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FOOD SYSTEM The food is shared unevenly, and people in many development countries are starving because of international food trade policies. It creates a lot of waste in form of packaging and food which is not eaten. It uses patented, artificially produced substances that are often unhealthy for the human body. Monoculture is creating a huge damage on natures biodiversity as well as requiring increased use of pesticides. It uses a lot of energy: an average of 10 calories of energy is used to produce one calory of food. It uses a lot of water: ex: 15 400 litres of water is used to produce one kg of beef. It is based on genetically modified and patented seeds the farmers have to pay a lot to have in their crop. If the wind carries with it seeds from your neighbour you also have to pay. Animals are suffering from overweight and other pains during transport and production in general. It is making unhealthy food cheap, and healthy food expensive. For references and to learn more about this complex issue, please read Michael Pollan’s “An Omnivores Dilemma” and Carolyn Steels “Hungry City”. Watch the documentaries “Food Inc.”, “Dirt” and “Farm for the Future”. Visit also Angela Morelli’s informative website about water consumption: http://www.angelamorelli.com/water/.
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THIS IS NOT SAL
LAD DRESSING!
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HERLIGHETEN PARSELLER What: Urban temporary community garden Where: Oslo When: 2012-2014 Made by: Bjørvika Utvikling, Kunstplass 5, Futurefarmers and other individuals. Web: http://www.bjorvikautvikling.no/herligheten As a part of a city planning strategy, a group of initiators wanted to create an urban garden by two tunnel pipes, in the middle of the construction site of the new area Bjørvika in Oslo. The project is considered an art project, all though it is obvious to me that this is design and small-scale architecture. The project is planned to stay for three years, before a new project is planned to take place on the spot. The aim was to engage people in an active use of the future city space, and to create a place that can bring people together across of cultures and backgrounds around the growing of food. 150 shares of 5 wooden crates each was announced for anyone in Oslo to apply. A list of 4000 people wanted in the end to have one of these places. The incredible number of applicants blew all of Oslo away.
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RESTAURANT DAY
What: International pop-up food festival, arranged four times a year. Where: Originated in Helsinki, but now exists globally. People are encouraged to set up a restaurant anywhere, in their kitchen, in the park, on the street, on a bridge. When: 2011 and onwards. Made by: Timo Santala and Kirsti Tuominen. Web: http://www.restaurantday.org/ Restaurant is a bottom-up initiative for enjoying food, sharing experiences and meeting new people in the city. It started in 2011 as a few Finnish guys and girls were tired of the food variety in Helsinki. They decided to open their own pop-up restaurant for one day, and encouraged others to do the same. So they did, and now it is a global series of events happening four times a year. As mentioned the food system needs different strategies for working with the food challenges. Restaurant Day is a positive and engaging way of directing focus to food and food culture amongst urban citizens. The change has to happen both at governmental, but most of all at a consumer level. I joined my two classmates Eva and Tabea and created a Restaurant Day the 19th of August 2012, called Broen Bakeri (pictured) and 17th of November (see “Farming� page 30)
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TOOLS TO THE PEOPLE! I believe that designers and innovators have always moved towards where they are needed the most. Last century the need for well functioning products for the masses was important to raise a global life standards and improve industrial production methods. As indicated, we now have a new and urgent need – sustainability. How can we start to use design as a tool to solve complex issues like the food challenge? The issues of the food system involves natural, social and financial worlds as stakeholders and users. John Wood states that these challenges are too complex for the individual designer to address as a task alone, and that we instead have to do it in collaborative teams. An emerging field working holistically with the sustainability-issue is Metadesign. It is a strategic framework for design that seeks to use design thinking in larger scale systems and on governmental and business levels. Metadesign wants to move away from the specialist designers to trace more creative solutions and possibilities by using collaborative approaches in interdiciplinary teams. One of the most fundamental strategies of metadesign is the one of “seeding”, when we define design as tools we can give to people for them to make the change themselves. Like the Chinese proverb says it: “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a fishing rod, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime” (Chinese proverb). Another strategy involves the use of synergies. Synergies 23
can be described as several things working together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Wood, 2007). For instance, by bringing a group of different practitioners around the same table, one could never plan the outcome of a discussion. This is the most fundamental level, but it could also be used with governmental and business actors. Metadesign focuses on using collaborative strategies like this as a part of their framework. Co-design is a wellestablished term that originated from a wish of involving users in the process to create a more suitable outcome. Throughout the last decades the design field has realized that the strength and potential of co-design does not only lie in the tailor-made. Alastair Fuad-Luke indicates that we can start to collaborate across disciplines, interests and hierarchies. Instead of traditional “design by planning�, co-design focuses on process: nonlinearity, iteration, interactivity. This can create new levels of ownership and quality, and the processes can continue by themselves after the designer leaves. What is also emerging around the world, and has been going on since the start of internet, is various kinds of Open Innovation. Here the designer is not longer a genius individual, but anyone, and collaborative development of ideas is becoming possible through platforms online or in the real world. We have been sharing ideas all through history, but as the capitalistic system has evolved, ideas have become extremely valuable, and we sell them for money. Ideas could be treated like knowledge: open for anyone, and crucial for our development and – survival. Would we be alive today if our one, genius ancestor charged millions of dollars for how to make a fire? The presented ways of thinking about and working with design can be defined as Socially Responsive Design (SRVD). Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman claims 24
that socially responsible design as defined by Victor Papanek may not be suitable enough for tackling wicked problems. The food challenge contains many different stakeholder agendas, and it is not clear who the designer should be responsible to. It demands design that is flexible and adaptable to its context and stakeholders like metadesign, co-design and others are. We have to think both bottom-up and top-down at the same time. In this way we can design the design. It is about defining the rules of the game instead of the game itself by creating tools that triggers processes, drives them forward and enables stakeholders to continue solution making on their own.
«One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change.» –Paola Antonelli.
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THE GENERATOR
What: Gigaworkshop to make various architectural structures based on one single chair Where: Venice Biennale di Architettura When: 2010 Made by: RaumlaborBerlin and visiting participants. Web: http://www.raumlabor.net
Raumlabor is working in the borderland between architecture, city planning and urban interventions. Through their philosophy and practice they want to challenge the view we have on architecture in the city and the people using it. They actively invite users into the city planning processes through workshops and other activities. “The Generator� is based on a chair construction, which can be reassembled in different structures in various ways, as either an amphi, a wall (pictured), alone or in groups. It was spread around the Biennale area where the visitors participated in the building process. A massive co-creation process with huge potential. In the end people could adopt the chair home where it got a new meaning, in another context. By splitting up architecture in parts, like this, it can become highly flexible. When the parts are in human and manageable scale it can lift the level of user participation to a whole new stage. The design becomes a tool for people to shape their own future and environment. A type of architecture and design that can adapt and change in pace with reality.
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WINDOWFARMS
What: OpenSource collaborative solutions for growing food in windows Where: Global (internet) When: 2009 Made by: Britta Riley Web: http://www.windowfarms.com/ By combining design with science research on hydroponic growing, which means gardening without soil, only nutritious water, Britta Reilley released a concept of growing food in bottles. She put it out on the internet, for free, with a manual as well as everything with it that didn’t work. In this way people started to experiment in their homes, creating their own effective window gardens. By also creating an online platform she enabled people to share their new ideas with each other, and the product started to develop. People for example suggested to replace the water pump with an air pump, as well as adding on grow lights and other ideas. After two years of collaborative research and development, they decided to create an industrial product to sell to people that does not want to start from scratch with bottles, and that maybe have other aesthetic standards. This is an example of how a totally open source collaboration can develop into an economically sustainable solution.
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ROPPONGI NOUEN
What: Social platform and restaurant to establish relationships between the city and rural areas, based on food. Where: Roppongi, Tokyo. When: 2009-ongoing. Made by: On Design for Umari. Autumn 2012 I went to Japan for a study trip, and visited Roppongi Nouen, a restaurant, farm and workshop space in the middle of urban Tokyo. They use their space as a platform for bringing city people together with farmers from the countryside. In this way they create new synergies that help the development of rural areas as well as preserving important food culture by bringing it into the city. The challenge they deal with is a big and urgent one in Japan. Centralization is creating huge cultural and social vacuums in the countryside. This issue does not have one solution. Roppongi Nouen are therefore strategically providing the possibilities for new relationships between people with different kinds of social, cultural and economic competencies. By hosting regular workshops, their design thinking is to create a physical platform that supports and facilitates a specific social program. The forming of the physical space supports and frames these activities, as a tool.
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HELLO, EXPERTS! As consumers in a global society today it feels like we are tailing behind large corporations and international markets. The food system as well as other systems are so complex and advanced that it is impossible to see and understand what is actually going on inside them. We loose track of the process that goes from the natural world and into our lives as well as the natural ecosystem that we undoubtedly are a part of. Furthermore, the choices we make others have decided for us – we become passive consumers. This has been described as the “cheap energy mind” by Wendell Berry. Because cheap fossil fuel is not only creating a more effective society, somehow it is also making it more ineffective and passive, because we are surrounded by experts to help us and to make our lives easier. But the fact is that the complex systems these experts belong to, they distance us more and more from the natural world. And at the same time we expect them to create solutions to our problems. What if we changed this view? What if we said: we are all experts? Of course, none of us is an all-round expert. But not so many years ago, our ancestors were able to make their own lives rich and meaningful, alone and together. With simple tools they harvested nature around them and used it as materials and for food. The point is not to romanticize a preindustrial society, but to learn from the ecological principal of using the resources
«Community is ecology – our ecology.» –Tony Fry
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that are around us. And to see that all individuals have different skills and knowledge, and by getting together in groups and work towards the same goal we can have a larger impact. Communities are in fact the building blocks of our society, and thus an important factor to understand in order to accommodate a sustainable future. But today’s society are very efficiency focused, and we tend to create relations that are short-term and strategical, rather than long-term and substantial, and all value is reduced to exchange value according to Tony Fry. By joining together and work towards the same long-term goal, communities can create systems where the participants can use each other as resources and not be dependent on the surrounding global systems. A common view of communities is that they exists in defined geographic places – as villages and towns. This is not how it works today, communities exists everywhere, and they are connected with each other, even globally. These communities are called multi-local communities. To break out from a passive consumer pattern, we also have to understand what we are a part of. Berry points out that we have to see our connection to a problem before we can do something about it. To see this is maybe hard for many, in their daily lives, and because of this the communities are also important, as learning situations. A type of learning communities is Communities of Practice (CoP). A group of people that evolves by themselves by sharing each others experience and knowledge. In may 2012, after four and a half year on a waiting list, me and my partner finally got a share in a community garden in the centre of Oslo. Here people shared their knowledge, experience and tools around a common profession with each other. I understood that this was a CoP, but in fact a very closed one that worked only 34
within the fences of the garden space. It was nearly impossible for people from the outside to take part in it. I started to wonder how it could be possible to make a CoP around food and urban farming more open.
The community garden I am a part of. A 100 years old beautiful paradise in the center of Oslo, where me and my partner rents 120 m2 of land.
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TRANSITION TOWNS What: Multi-local, resilient communities Where: Global, Oslo, Sagene When: 2005-ongoing Made by: Rob Hopkins Web: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
Transition town is a phenomenon that has been growing rapidly the last years. Their aim is to create high-level resilient, local communities that are capable of standing against global changes by themselves. By creating these local communities, they are also able to create more controlled systems to support themselves, like alternative exchange systems, food production and energy production. The first one was established in 2005/6, in Totnes in England, and the creator saw how their philosophy could help communities also other places. He created several handbooks and films, and by the time I write this book, 3.058 people, projects and communities were registered as Transiton Towns initiators. If you want to start a Transition Town, there is no do’s or don’ts you adapt it to your own locality and its needs. In Oslo there is one called Omstilling Sagene, founded in 2011. They focus a lot on food and local food production and engaging people through this. The summer of 2012 they created a mobile garden in a trailer and gained a lot of attention and awareness around food also outside the community. They are concerned with learning and knowledge sharing by holding courses in for instance sour dough baking and old fermentation techniques.
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INCREDIBLE EDIBLE
What: Bottom up, local food initiatives. Where: Todmorden, United Kingdom, and other cities. When: 2008-ongoing Made by: Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear Web: http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
Founders Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear engaged in a public meeting the local citizens into growing their own food in dead spaces in their town Todmorden, UK. They did it without permission and with artistic and design consciousness. It developed to become a huge project, and today food is growing everywhere. Later they decided to create a public route (also without permission). They made a pathway of greens, biodiverse areas that stretches through the city. It goes past local shops, local markets, and binds together the city with the Incredible Edible Green Route. They also engaged local schools to grow and build gardens, before also creating gardens for teaching and a horticultural course. Finally they also created a system of supporting local food suppliers and producers, called Incredible Edible. Sales have increased and attention towards local food is spreading also nationally. 30 towns in England is now working with Incredible Edible programs to replicate the same. Now the government wants to support the program, so finally, what started around a kitchen table now is discussed on political level. Bottom-up can do real change. Their motto: “If you eat, you’re in!”.
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«Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do.» -Michael Pollan
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TOWARDS AN IDEAL FUTURE I have described the complexities of the food system today, and that design and design thinking can be used as a tool for looking at and solving these kinds of complex problems. By becoming a member of a CoP, I realized that there is much potential in creating and learning from and with each other. I wanted to explore how I could work with communities combining food and design to generate solutions for a sustainable future. As mentioned, a sustainable food system should consist of good solutions for growing, delivering, enjoying and waste. To look at all these at once is more than anyone can handle alone, at least in a masters project. When I chose to work with urban farming it was because I really believe that growing your own food could be a part of releasing pressure on the global food production – if all of us grew just a little amount of our own food we will make a huge difference. I believe that design can be the ways of finding the needed solutions, as tools for a society in change. These tools can be used in collaborative learning communities that can work across generations, cultures and social layers to find solutions together in continuous, mutual learning processes. We have to start working “in stereo” rather than “mono”. This is why I have become interested in finding out what these new ways of designing could be, and how I can find new ways of working. I believe that design together with food really can save the world!
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I know that this is a very idealistic way of thinking about both design and the food challenge. To be idealistic is perhaps considered being naive and pretentious. But it is also a way of imagining ideal, utopian futures, that can be a driving force in my work – for me, and that I can transfer to others. As John Wood (2007) says: “Dreaming optimistically simply means envisioning possibilities that others may not have noticed. It is the first step to creating a better world.” If people in the past rationalized about everything we would probably not have either air planes, space ships or internet. So.. In order to save the world I craved for action. I wanted to help the engaged people in Oslo with growing their own food. I wanted it to invite everyone interested – experts and nonexperts so that they could learn from and with each other. And I wanted to give them the tools that they needed to do what they could to save the world, together in a community. To be able to see clearer the relationship between these elements in my project – design(tools), participants and knowledge (about farming and gardening), I mapped them together in a metamodel. The result explains a community of practice which consists of participants that shares a profession or craft. Since a CoP is about practice, it also uses different kinds of tools. In for instance the community garden I belong to, these tools are the gardening tools that we use and share with each other, as well as seeds, plants, gardening design and so on. The tools enables the community to evolve through practice. In the section “Farming” you will see how I tried to cultivate a CoP urban farming in the middle of the winter. And what happened when I replaced spades, soil and seeds with various kinds of design tools.
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use & development
Participants
Design/ tools
R&D
learning
Knowledge (farming/ gardening)
input/output
Knowledge
research
Design
use/ testing
Users
community of practice opensource commons
Tools, participants and knowledge creates communities of practice. It is dynamic and process oriented. The same parts exists in a traditional way of doing design where the knowledge in form of research is contained in the object itself, being released through use, but are more static.
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