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Computational Agroecology: Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We propose a new domain for sociotechnical system design: creating new ecosystems for food production that are sustainable while producing high yields. Drawing on the field of agroecology, we discuss techniques for allowing a range of users to design sustainable food ecosystems that can overcome the environmental costs of industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture, relying on declining reserves of fossil fuels and generating increasingly costly externalities, is unsustainable. Agroecology cannot scale until practitioners have access to detailed knowledge of local conditions and appropriate agricultural strategies. This paper reviews the agricultural and sustainability challenges that motivate our research. It describes design problems that must be addressed to scale agroecology. We discuss our initial work, and sketch a program of research we believe will contribute to global food security.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2016
    3954 pages
    ISBN:9781450340823
    DOI:10.1145/2851581
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 07 May 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. agroecology
    2. sustainable hci

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    May 7 - 12, 2016
    California, San Jose, USA

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    CHI EA '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 1,000 of 5,000 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)End-to-End Security for Distributed Event-driven Enclave Applications on Heterogeneous TEEsACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/359260726:3(1-46)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Le désalignement de valeurs dans les interactions : une opportunité pour l'IHM soutenableProceedings of the 34th Conference on l'Interaction Humain-Machine10.1145/3583961.3583964(1-10)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2023
    • (2023)HCI Research on Agriculture: Competing Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Definitions, and OpportunitiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581081(1-24)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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    • (2022)Noticing the Environment – A Design Ethnography of Urban FarmingNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546659(1-13)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
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    • (2022)Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in livingProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501929(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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