Information systems for this group should support participants’ efforts to engage in “people care, earth care, and fair share,” but also work to support their resistance, technology, and long-term values. If an IT is designed to support some form of quotidian insubordination, such as producing and trading open-pollination seed and plants, and participants prefer to engage in these acts anonymously, then ITs for this group need to allow for anonymous usage and interaction. Furthermore, that IT is meant to support a community and therefore must be a community asset, not subject to heteromation. Heteromation is the occurrence of a single person or entity financially benefiting from the work of an unpaid or underpaid community . Heteromation is directly at odds with the community’s anti-consumerism and long-term equality values. The IT needs to be “open” to the community so it can “regenerate” the system to match their evolving needs in the long-term. Also, the IT needs to work across a range of platforms and operating systems, from new to very old, from mobile to desktop, and work even with intermittent internet connectivity. ITs designed for this group must also fit in with their selective use values. Overwhelmed by “technologies that reach into all corners of life” , these communities do not desire yet another complex sociotechnical solution with marginal returns. In modern times, sociotechnical infrastructures are not always well thought out solutions. Bødker explains that in the third wave of HCI, researchers rapidly designed and introduced ITs in an exploratory fashion, typically with short-lasting or little impact, to understand which questions to ask. In effect, Bødker argues, the discipline has “just dump[ed] technology on people.” Indeed, grow bag the inundation of technology has made the participating communities more critical of technology. These communities also engaged in selective use of IT due to its implications in unsustainability.
Baumer and Silberman argued that “it is not obvious that the complex conditions associated with unsustainability … are best addressed with computing technology.” Tainter explains that although complex system can be very effective at addressing social problems, such as sustainability, at some point the complexity of the system becomes so great that the returns are marginal . If the complexity is left unconstrained, Tainter argues, diminishing returns become negative, meaning the system is ineffective at problem solving, and the system is vulnerable to collapse. Considering Tainter’s argument in the context of sociotechnical systems, Raghavan and Pargman suggest simplifying system complexity through the software concept of refactoring . Refactoring software is the process of applying techniques that makes code more efficient and readable, breaking down complex functionality into simpler parts, and limiting external inputs. Applying these same techniques to sociotechnical systems, Raghavan and Pargman argue, could productively address their issues of growing complexity. They provide 22 signs of a society that could be refactored with abstract concepts of how they could be refactored. For example, Raghavan and Pargman explain that removing duplicated code, including code with variations but similar functionality, is a form of software refactoring that can be applied to sociotechnical systems in the sense that similar functionalities can be consolidated. For example, disjointed efforts within an institution to build plant data services for farmers would better serve the institution and the farmers if they were consolidated into an interoperable system. I argue that the concept of sociotechnical refactoring is particularly appropriate for permaculture communities in part because it overlaps with permaculture practices. Specifically, permaculture aims to limit external inputs to their sustainable polycultures. For example, in a polyculture, nutrients for plants should be provided by other plants in the ecosystem or from on-site compost rather than off-site fertilizer.
Therefore, an IT created for a permaculture community that curbs the external inputs into their agroecosystems or information ecology will be better at addressing the community’s complex conditions associated with unsustainability than an IT that does not. If no IT can possibly provide a refactoring service to the sociotechnical system, then, as Baumer and Silverman argued, sometimes the implication is not to design technology. I argue that another way to address complex sociotechnical conditions associated with unsustainability is to ensure the IT systems empower the communities and provide their members with agency so that they can sustain themselves in the absence of the IT. In earlier work, my colleagues and I describe a self-obviating system which renders itself unnecessary by offering some service that solves or addresses a problem . In other words, the IT’s impacts remain even after it is removed from the information ecology. For example, an IT system that teaches the community how to design sustainable polycultures could facilitate the transition of enough newcomers to full participants to encourage face-to-face social learning as the community norm, rendering the information system un- or less necessary in the long-term as that knowledge becomes a part of the community’s sociocultural capital. Though the information challenges the participants faced are in theory well-suited for technological intervention, many of these permaculture, resistance, technological, and long-term values present serious tensions with adoption of modern ITs. The next section describes those challenges and Chapter 5 explores how to address them.There are many kinds of plant information, not all of which are relevant to agroecosystem design broadly , or to sustainable polyculture design specifically. Creating a sustainable polyculture design requires a significant understanding of plant relationships and human uses, as described in 1.1. However, as described in 4.1, students struggled with creating a sustainable polyculture design that specified plants, their placement, and their function.
The permaculture community draws upon ethnobotany, agroecology, and horticulture for information. Horticulture simply means “garden cultivation” in Latin, but the discipline has a more specific characterization – “the cultivation, processing, and sale of fruits, nuts,vegetables, and ornamental plants and flowers” in addition to services such as installing and maintaining landscapes . Horticulture requires a working knowledge of the average form characteristics and growth conditions of a plant population . Permaculture plant characteristic data is most similar to the level of detail found in information resources authored by horticulturalists, such as plant nurseries, and gardening websites, and books. Ethnobotanists and anthropologists have studied ways in which people around the world have classified and used plants for medicine, food, religious ceremony, and other cultural functions. Sustainable polyculture designers use these categories of data and others to choose which plants to include in the polyculture . How people use plants or arrange mutually beneficial relationships among plants in agricultural systems is based upon observation and experience. As described in section 2.1.2 observation and experience are forms of empirical knowledge in activist research. However, such empirical knowledge cannot be found in one place—it is held by individuals or disassociated communities or cultures, or, in this case, members of the participating communities. Much empirical knowledge exists as unrecorded folk knowledge , and still more knowledge has been lost during the colonialization of indigenous farming communities . In addition to horticultural knowledge, I aim to capture the recorded and unrecorded folk knowledge of individuals in the participating communities so that it can be organized and distributed to other and new members.The intrinsic characteristics that participants most commonly used in sustainable polyculture design were plants form, structure, and seasonal characteristics. Agroecology utilizes similar characteristic data. What participants referred to as “intrinsic characteristics” are known as “functional plant traits” in formal plant sciences . Functional plant traits include physiological, biochemical, morphological , anatomical, and phenological traits . Conventional agriculture utilizes functional plant trait data that are favorable for domestication and yield , but agroecologists use functional trait data to choose species or cultivated varieties to reduce detrimental negative and increase productive ecological impacts . More recently, agroecology researchers started incorporating functional plant ecology– the study of plant ecology across scales – through the comparison of species along axes of functional traits to predict plant responses to, and impacts on, surrounding environments . For example, functional plant ecology evaluates a plants functional response to drivers of climate change – Trevathan-Tackett et al. determines the functional traits of sea grass that impacts their ability to sequester carbon. Agroecologists’ incorporation of functional plant ecology in the design of agroecosystems is similar to and has the potential to bolster the functional analysis cycles to create the ecological balances necessary to form a sustainable polyculture.Without access to functional trait, horticultural, and folk knowledge, grow bag gardening many newcomer participants to sustainable polyculture design ceased their involvement, concluding the process was too difficult and the learning curve too steep. To help members of the communities engage in sustainable polyculture design, the SAGE Plant Database captures both folk and horticultural knowledge and organizes the relationships among plants and ethnobotanical uses.The goals and requirements emerged from six forms of qualitative data discussed in Chapter 3 . For this line of inquiry, I conducted all analytical coding with the intention of determining goals and requirements for the plant database. In this analysis, I assessed the contexts that inform the goals, form, and functions of the database.
All coding entailed taking notes in a physical notebook while referencing digital and physical copies of observation notes, design workshop notes, surveys, interview transcriptions, community-authored artifacts, and community-referenced artifacts that were used in, were a product of, or which described participant’s agroecosystem design process. I conducted the first phase of coding by listing high-level agroecosystem design and the implementation activities that participants engaged in. For every occurrence of a high level activity, such as installing a grey-water system, I identified the fine-grained actions that made up the activity, the tools used in the activity, and contexts the activities occurred in. I translated each fine-grained action, tool, and context into potential goals and requirements for a plant database. The participants had many goals for the SAGE Plant Database. I identified two overarching themes within the participants’ goals: goals that support the agroecosystem design process, and goals that support the communities’ ethics and values. All of the goals are presented in section 5.2.1. The participants had many requirements for the SAGE Plant Database. I found two themes among the participants’ system requirements: those that specify the plant database’s functions and those requirements that support the communities’ values. The system requirements are presented in section 5.2.2.Participants from the design workshop and those involved in early brainstorming agreed that the SAGE Plant Database needed to represent and inform community plant knowledge, and that this knowledge should be of high quality. Its purpose should be to aggregate all the local plant knowledge into one place and allow individuals to use that information, much like their own plant lists, in their sustainable polyculture design process. Many participants were concerned about the quality of plant data in the database and observed that less knowledgeable community members sometimes confused plants because several different plants are referred to by the same common name. This phenomenon is perpetuated by the fact that many gardening resources also omit scientific name or images, which are the most uniform signposts for confirming which plant the information is about. Although, all participants envisioned the database as an electronic store-house of local plant information, many participants envisioned it doing more than just that. Some participants also envisioned the database as a computer-mediated social learning tool. They wanted to connect with and learn from their peers using the database. For example, one participant envisioned a “click here if you’re growing” widget to indicate how much of that plant was being cultivated by the community and who was growing it. Many participants wanted to see their peers’ techniques for planting, growing, and harvesting, but had varying ideas of how that would manifest. However, most participants fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Some participants envisioned the database as a learning tool, but without the social component. For example, one participant wanted the database to visually display inputs and outputs of the plant and suggest which plants could provide the inputs. Others had a limited view of social-learning, where the social aspect was only the “collaborative” effort to create a knowledge base. Because participants did not all agree on these extra features of the SAGE Plant Database, most of them are not included in the baseline design presented in this chapter. Some of them, however, are under consideration for future work. On the surface, the identifiable nature of the social-learning concepts for the database, such as knowing who planted what plant in which location, appears to conflict with some participants desire for anonymity.