In urban farming communities, enthusiasts adopt urban land and cooperatively develop the space with organic cultivations. This kind of gardening is guided by several ideals, which are part of the farmers’ motivation. However, gardening alone cannot meet the requirements for establishing a community in the city environment. The activities and ideals of the urban farms need to be negotiated and articulated to various stakeholders, including local establishments, other citizens, and city governments. Based on a three-year field study of urban community farms in three countries, we describe how the negotiation and articulation of the organizational, material, and ideological boundaries unfolded both internally and externally in these communities. We provide concrete empirical examples of how such communities develop, what their challenges are, and how they can be supported by technology. We use the lens of civic engagement as a point of departure to situate urban farming and community technologies as a phenomenon. The main contributions of this paper are accounts of the kind of articulation work that volunteer-based civic engagement communities face and design qualities related to this boundary articulation.

Research on environmental sustainability in HCI is investigating the opportunities and hindrances technologies pose on living sustainably, beyond direct material impact of production, use and disposal. With this background, we focus on the smartphone camera as a tool that allows users to quickly and relatively effortlessly depict, save, share, access, augment or amplify information about the environment. Based on two years of participant observation studies, we present examples of how urban farmers use the smartphone camera as a tool in their practice. We discuss how the smartphone camera mediates human experiences of the environment and how certain uses of the camera may contribute to environmental sustainability. We highlight how the smartphone camera used as a tool in gardening was experienced to support (a) feelings of closeness or bonds towards the local environment and (b) the creation and sharing of knowledge.

Sustainable HCI attempts to shift focus beyond humans, to care for both ourselves and our environment. In this paper, we build on this growing interest and contribute with a design ethnography of urban farming. We focus on practices of observing and gathering data about the environment which we frame as ‘noticing’. In our analysis, three approaches to noticing the environment were iden- tified, and design suggestions were developed for each approach: Green Thumbs (control-oriented), Dirty Nails (sensibility-oriented) and BeeNoculars (appreciation-oriented). The design suggestions, presented as posters, focus on ways to improve the alignment of the acquisition and display of data with the identified approaches. We discuss two themes: the noticing and balancing of systemic rela- tions and needs, and sensory-rich experiences of the environment. The paper contributes to a broader discussion in HCI of how tech- nologies could create a different understanding of and relationship to the environment.

Due to the ongoing environmental crisis, there is an increased interest in technologies that strengthen relations to the environment. This pictorial contributes to a broader discussion in HCI on how technologies could create a different understanding of and relationship to the more-than-human world. It focuses on soil care practices, and how current (limited) capacities of digital sensing could be complemented with soil chromatography - a qualitative chemical test method for visually assessing soil health. The pictorial is based on a series of workshops conducted in an urban community farm. The discussion focuses on how interactive technologies may support the process of conducting and interpreting soil chromatography and what it means to study, care for, and design with the more-than-human.

More-than-human-centred design is a growing field in HCI (human-computer interaction) that account for non-human actors in design processes (such as animals, plants, and microbes but also autonomous technologies). While the rationale for more-than-human-centred design is clear, there is a lack of design methods grounded in this thinking. We articulate the idea of noticing as a method for approaching design spaces as systems of mutual interdependence between organisms. The findings are based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of urban farming—including the study of urban farmers’ practices and use of technologies with a focus on the interplay between humans and non-humans, such as plants and microbes. We articulate noticing as a phenomenon and show examples of urban farmers’ practices of noticing. We discuss principles for designing with the interdependencies of several organisms based on what is noticed in a setting. We argue that the way we have separated ideas about the environment and human experience is a part of the sustainability problem—and suggest noticing as an approach that instead combines positive human experiences and the needs of the environment.