IxD Lab

Digital Agroecology: Agri-Tech between Grassroots and Capitalism
2025-11-06 12:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Sebastian Prost, City St. George’s University of London
Abstract:
Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, preventing more radical solutions such as agroecology taking root. In this talk, I will present findings from fieldwork with 11 small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, colleagues and I found instead that current digital tools poorly support farmers’ work with nature. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. Based on these insights, I will present guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. More broadly, I present a call to reimage digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.

Bio:
Sebastian is a Lecturer at the Centre for HCI Design at City St George’s, University of London, working in the intersection of food and technology, where they esplore responsible socio-digital innovations with local food networks and smallholder farms. They are interested in questions of sustainability, social justice, more-than-human design, and building long-term community relationships through participatory design.

(In cooperation with ITU’s Center for Climate IT)

Temporal Infrastructures: Design Ethnographies of Delay, Care, and Institutional Life
2025-08-14 13:00 - 14:00
Catherine Wieczorek, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
This talk explores time as a form of infrastructure, something not only scheduled or measured but built, sustained, and contested through everyday institutional practice. Temporal patterns such as delays, shifting priorities, and overlapping demands are not simply dysfunctions to be resolved, but are fundamental to how systems behave under conditions of ongoing uncertainty. Based on preliminary findings from design ethnographies at two U.S.-based sites (i.e., sexual healthcare delivery and public libraries), we consider how actors navigate time as a material and political force, increasingly entangled with hybrid socio-technical systems. By studying how time is patterned and negotiated within institutions, this research invites designers to consider how historical and organizational temporalities shape the conditions under which technical systems succeed, fail, or are re-interpreted in practice.
Bio
Catherine Wieczorek (she/her) is a designer and researcher pursuing a PhD in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. Her work integrates design research, qualitative methods, and science and technology studies to examine how time, infrastructure, and institutional life shape the use and experience of technology in everyday settings. Before her doctoral studies, she worked as a design researcher at public health research centers and consultancies, including Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s D-Lab, Flip Labs, and the Design Lab at the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago. Catherine holds an MS in Informatics from Penn State University, a Master of Design from the IIT Institute of Design, and a BA in Visual Communication from Loyola University Chicago.
