MID seminar with Sebastian Prost, Centre for HCI Design at City St George’s, University of London

Title: Regenerative Technology: What can designers and engineers learn from farmers?

What would it take for digital technology to not just be sustainable, but regenerative? To sketch out what that might mean, this talk draws on forms of agriculture that restore, not destroy natural ecosystems. In agriculture, capitalist pressures towards increased farm automation and surveillance through digital sensing, machine learning and robotics sit in tension with agroecological resistance and prefigurative alternatives that farm with nature, form land-based communities, and seek food sovereignty.

Against this background, I will present three interconnected projects on the relation between ecological farming and digital technology: findings from an interview study with small-scale UK farmers on their use of and views on digital technology; a speculative design study of 'agri-cultural' probes on possible future farm technologies; and the development of a set of principles and a card deck for regenerative technology, drawing on agroecological systems.

I will outline a tentative research agenda for regenerative technology design within agriculture and three ongoing and planned projects. One aims at infrastructuring farmer-led digital co-production through the support and strengthening of existing grassroots peer-to-peer networks. This is instantiated by two technology case studies: a researcher-led project on soil health through listening and more-than-human storytelling; and a farmer-led project on a sowing and weeding robot suitable for agroecological production systems.

Bio

I am a Lecturer at the Centre for HCI Design at City St George’s, University of London. I've got an interdisciplinary background in Computer Science, Sociology, and HCI. My research and design practice sits at the intersection of food and technology. I currently work with local food networks and farmers critiquing capitalist modes of tech production and co-designing digital tools within ecological limits. I'm interested in questions of alternative economies, design justice, more-than-human relations, (un)making, hacking, social innovation/exnovation, and community-based participatory design.