Collective design intervention
Solarpunk emerged as a reaction to the prevalence of post-apocalyptic and dystopian media alongside increased awareness of social injustices, impacts of climate change, and inextricable economic inequality. Our focus lies on Farming and Agriculture because they contribute to almost 11% of all green-house gases emissions in an industrial ecosystem. That combined with the manufacturing of the plastic packaging, shipping of consumables and the fuel invested sums up to a quarter of all the greenhouse gas emissions altogether.
1st step - Brain storming
As part of the solar punks collective, I expressed first my interest in farming the city and how to create more awareness about how much effort there is behind the food that comes to our plates daily. I have a strong interest in arts and aesthetics so one of my proposals was to create an agriactivism art installation with plants and seeds to start a conversation. Being a group with so many different backgrounds does not surprise me that we had many different areas of interest. At the same time working with five people could be difficult to agree on one intervention. I might say that I have to build up all my patience and my skills on team working since I wanted to have a more hands-on approach and we spent a lot of time discussing our options.
Nevertheless, all the options that came on the table were very interesting, like creating a toolkit for a farm for dummies, working with agricultural waste, 3D print food snacks, reusing daily live objects to create planters,... but for a reason we weren't all fully convinced by any of them. Also due to the fact that we didn’t have a lot of time to do the intervention, we had to discard many other options related to growing plants. At the end we were all driven by the concept of agriactivism, but still it was a very wide topic and had many ways to be approached.
Framing our possible interventions
Thanks to the community engagement lessons we were able to deconstruct our ideas and map them in a Miro board to better understand what we actually wanted to work in, that was agriculture and food systems. With this mapping we came to realize how many agents take part in this huge system and also how many organizations and cooperatives are involved right now in Barcelona to change it. Defining our challenge helped us a lot: "Creating awareness amongst people in an urban landscape about the food they consume and where it comes from." Our first approach was going to Connect Hort, a place where many of us are already involved and volunteer. We wanted to better understand their necessities and see if we as designers could help them somehow. There is a workshop on urban agriculture, and they explained to us that they use a planter that it is very inconvenient for the participants to take home and continue with what they have learned at home.
Narrowing down our options
Therefore we decided to investigate deeper into interesting ways to grow our own food at home, which has been one of my main interests since the beginning of the masters. So we started to work on how we could redesign the planter and what is the actual benchmark. There are many interesting devices to pursue this task but they were too technological and fancy for us, since we wanted to close the loop and reuse materials. After our first design review with Jonathan we came to the conclusion that redesigning a planter would be interesting, but where can we actually create meaningful impact within the food and agriculture system? What if we represent the system as it is, linear. And try to find ways on how to make it circular.
Consequently, from this idea we were more focused on all the discarded food that the system generates since its very start. Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption gets lost or wasted every year. When harvesting there are many fruits and vegetables that are discarded because they don't look good enough or they don't have the conventional shape of a perfectly straight carrot. Passing by the many tossed away during their transport to the ones that get ripe in supermarkets. Without mentioning all the food thrown away in restaurants and any kind of cantines. Finally we found our target, so now how do we address it?
Discarded food… where to start? Most of us are trying to have a zero waste life, therefore collecting our leftovers wouldn’t be a big challenge. We were also debating between cooking the food at home and giving it away on the streets or trying to somehow involve people in the cooking process. Thanks to Dafne we got the perfect venue we needed to throw a cooking workshop at their studio in Hospitalet and this was how Conversaciones Maduras intervention started to take shape.
Miro board
Conversaciones maduras
Hence we decided to go to the grocery stores in our neighborhoods and ask for the fruits and vegetables that were not in “good” condition to be sold anymore. But this wasn’t an easy thing to get and we were more interested in getting all the products that don’t even reach the supermarkets. Conversaciones Maduras addresses and acts on the negligence of food waste by closing a feedback loop. The first intervention consisted of a workshop that upcycled waste resources collected from the Mercabarna warehouses into a cooking workshop. The participation involved people from different positionalities, cultures and backgrounds within BCN.
Mercabarna is a food-trading state that comprises 4 wholesale markets. It is a public limited organisation, established in 1967. Thanks to Arnau (Anna’s friend) we got a tour of the pavilions G and H, as well as Biomarket, where mostly vegetables and fruits are sold. Products usually go through 3 phases before being discarded and thrown away into shredders and organic matter containers. This happens every 2-3 days generally and everyday at the Biomarket. We were able to rescue many fruits and vegetables that would have been discarded,despite the difficulties we found due to security at the facilities and current political regime. I was able to speak with many Payeses who explained to me first-hand how they feel completely trapped inside a food system that makes them produce in crazy quantities and their worries about the control of seeds by big companies like Monsanto. We were also explained how there is a Green Pavilion for donations, which also rejected tons of food every week.
In addition, in order to preserve some of the most ripe fruits we made some Compota de manzana madura bottled out of apples, spicy salsa and Aam Papad out of mangoes. This was served with crackers for people to try before diving into the workshop.To reach out to our public, pamphlets, recipe books and Instagram creatives were developed. The recipe book was inspired from the ‘Absolute zero waste book’ by Ikea kitchens.
During the workshop itself there were different activities carried out, like how to make your own compost, mapping the food origins, making art out of vegetable peels… But the shared cooking activity was by far the most enjoyed by the participants. The creativity of iterating recipes was entirely lent to the participants. The ingredients and produce were undisclosed until the workshop began, to keep the process organic and impromptu. The recipes and the food that came out of this activity were astonishingly creative and delicious.
A survey was conducted to the participants to better understand their experience and what we can improve for future workshops. We also created an images data set to generate a visual using Artificial Intelligence. The expected output is a visual life-cycle covering a product’s origin, shelf-life and degradation. A website was created to gather all this information and show all the dishes and different outputs generated.
As a next step of Conversaciones Maduras, we decided to use the design dialogues exhibition as a second intervention itself. We interacted with faculties, practitioners, design-activists and prominent stakeholders from the Industry. To better engage the public a hot-sauce brand was envisioned and developed. Two taste profiles (European and Indian) were created using products from the Mercabarna ecosystem. The real components were made evident on the labels to maintain the main driver of Conversaciones Maduras, which is transparency and authenticity.
Even though I wasn’t feeling my best the day of the 1st workshop due to a severe ear infection, I managed to have a great time and learn a lot from the participants and my classmates. For me, the intervention went even better than expected. Since I never thought about food design before and this intervention opened my horizons. I find that it can be the link that I was missing between crafts, social inclusion and my greener interests. I truly enjoy cooking and people usually like what I prepare so why not try to design new food systems that will have a positive impact on our lives and the planet. Cooking is a way of crafting and socially healing moments, exchanging cultures and techniques. Craft was technology, it has been directly linked to cooking. It is an example of patience and evolution. By controlling what we eat and what we produce we directly affect the health of the planet. Eating is a political act.