growBot Garden
Participatory workshops & events exploring robotics for smaller-scale farms.
Over the past 100 years, agriculture practices have been radically altered in Western societies, spurred by the development and application of a host of technologies designed to automate and monitor food production. Engineering and design played a role in advancing the culture and practices of agri-business by producing products, systems, and services to advance and support large-scale corporate farming. We ask, Can design and engineering now play a role in shifting us toward more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services, and systems would need to be designed and engineered to enable that subversion and shift? How will automation and monitoring technologies need to be refigured for these contexts – if indeed they are still useful?
The growBot garden project explored these questions by bringing together designers, artists, farmers, and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used to support local small-scale agriculture?
The growBot Garden project was structured around a series of public and participatory workshops that brought together diverse constituencies to think critically about, discuss, and debate agricultural technologies for small-scale agriculture. The workshops drew equally from practices of participatory design, critical design, social practice art, and DIY culture. More than a discursive platform, the workshops were design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. These representations and prototypes were documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages emerging at the intersection of technology and agriculture.
The project included multiple site visits to farms and dairies in the Atlanta region, two outreach events and three design workshops in Atlanta, and 10 days of workshops and exhibitions as part of the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, CA.
2009-2012
Concept and Research: Laura Fries, Thomas Lodato, Beth Schecter, Andy Quitmeyer, Thomas Barnwell, and Carl DiSalvo
Related Publications
DiSalvo, Carl. 2014. Critical Making as Materializing the Politics of Design. The Information Society, 30(2), 96-105.
DiSalvo, Carl. 2014. The Growbot Garden Project as DIY Speculation through Design. In DIY Citizenship: Critical making and social media, edited by Megan Bohler and Matt Ratto. MIT Press.
DiSalvo, Carl, and Thomas Lodato, Laura Fries, Beth Schechter, Beth, & Thomas Barnwell. 2011. The Collective Articulation of Issues as Design Practice. CoDesign, 7(3-4), 185-197.