Fruit Are Heavy

Concrete Jungle is a non-profit that provides fresh food to those in need. They forage, glean, and farm fruits and vegetables, which are given to food pantries, shelters, and other social service providers in Atlanta and Athens. When foraging, it’s important to know when the fruit is ripe, or else you might miss the opportunity to gather it. But because most of the foraged trees were planted ad hoc and grow opportunistically, keeping track of the fruit is a challenge, requiring significant time and effort.

Working together with members of Concrete Jungle, we created a custom sensing platform to detect the relative bend in a fruit tree branch as a proxy for its ripeness: the riper the fruit, the heavier the branch, the more bend in the sensor. We tested this platform over two summers, exploring whether it would work and how integrating sensing into practices of foraging might change those practices. Through these collaborations, we hope to support the work of foraging while also providing examples of how else sensing technologies might be used in so-called smart cities, in this case, to support diverse community economies.

2015-2018

Concept and Research: Tom Jenkins, Craig Durkin, and Carl DiSalvo

Software and Hardware: Tom Jenkins and Craig Durkin

Housing Design: Catherine Meschia

Service Design: Natalie Larkins

Related Publications
DiSalvo, Carl. 2022. Design as Democratic Inquiry. MIT Press.

DiSalvo, Carl. and Tom Jenkins. 2017. “Fruit are Heavy: A prototype public IoT system to support urban foraging.” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

Related Media
Field Test. 2016. Dublin Science Gallery.