Horizon CDT Research Highlights

Research Highlights

Visible Food Systems: Exploring Community-led Narratives through Participatory and Speculative Visualisation

  Saria Digregorio (2023 cohort)   www.linkedin.com/in/saria

Supervisors:
Martin Flintham (Computer Science / HCI)
Anne Touboulic (Business School)
Robert Laramee ​​​​​​​(Computer Science / Visualisation)

Industry Partner:
StreetBox (food surplus veg box scheme)

This research explores how narratives about food systems transformation are represented through visual artefacts and how design processes and digital technologies can be used to make community-led narratives more visible. 

This research adopts participatory and speculative design methods, with the intention of increasing community engagement and agency in the visualisation process. The participatory and speculative visualisation process will lead to the development of digital and physical visual artefacts, direct actions, and educational tools to share knowledge, negotiate future visions, and disseminate community-led narratives about food systems transformation, with the aim of promoting food justice and food citizenship.

This research also offers the chance to investigate the role of visual rhetoric in shaping the visualisation process and inform the development of frameworks for visual narratives analysis and toolkits for participatory and speculative visualisation. 

A broader research aim is to encourage 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.

Publications

Digregorio, M.R. (2020) 'When Everything Goes Wrong Make a Diagram', in 2CO Communicating Complexity: Contributions from the 2017 Tenerife Conference.

This author is supported by the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Nottingham (UKRI Grant No. EP/S023305/1).