Supervisors: Martin Flintham (Computer Science) & Anne Touboulic (Business School)

Industry Partner: TBC

Visible Food Systems explores how digital technologies and information design processes can be used to visualise the environmental and social implications of food systems at a community level, with the aim of making food justice narratives more visible. 

This research adopts a participatory design approach and speculative design methods for the visualisation process, with the intention of increasing community engagement and agency in negotiating future visions for food systems transformation. 

The participatory and speculative visualisation process will be used as a tool to learn about food justice and inform the design of custom smart labels, interactive maps, tangible artefacts, and digital archives to share knowledge about food systems and disseminate transformation narratives. 

This research also offers the chance to investigate the role of visual rhetoric in shaping the visualisation process and aims to develop tools and frameworks for participatory and speculative visualisation. 

A broader research aim is to develop a playful and convivial approach to visualisation based on shared analysis and creative interpretation, and investigate how this approach can foster collective learning, community building, and civic engagement.