Conference Agenda

This study investigates the pivotal role of professional chefs as food designers, emphasizing informed decision-making, community engagement, and strategic partnerships in pursuing regenerative practices within food systems. Through participant observation in southeast Brazilian food service venues, we examine chefs' views and actions regarding the socio-political-environmental ramifications of their choices, including labor practices and ingredient sourcing. Businesses were selected based on their commitment to sustainable or regenerative ideals. Findings underscore the chefs' influence in thoughtfully selecting ingredients, suppliers, and labor, impacting territory health, community well-being, cultural preservation, and economic prosperity. This research contributes with practical insights for building a more equitable and sustainable food system in Brazil based on systemic design principles, global food systems trends, and local experiences.

Commoning is on the rise as a socio-economic practice advancing the outlook of more just food systems. While smaller commoning operations can predominantly rely on informal arrangements, tracking and monitoring the conditions of the use of resources becomes vital for larger operations. This paper explores the datafication of hunger, pleasure, ingredients, cooking and spoiled food for crafting imaginaries of commoning-based algorithmic food futures. To address not only frictions around datafication but also gainful proposals, the paper mobilizes concepts of ‘unwieldy data’, ‘good enough data’, and ‘minimal feasible datafication’. It uses fiction writing as a method to amalgamate scholarly references in the field of citizen sensing and smart city critique with preliminary learnings from a speculative city-making project into an infrastructural proposal. The text aims to prompt a wider debate about the potentials and pitfalls of algorithmic governance and datafication in infrastructures for the urban-scale distribution of material resources, such as food.

Cultural globalisation threatens some traditional foods, as foreign food cultures can make local foods less popular. While food-related rituals play a crucial role in enhancing cultural identity and the overall experience of traditional food, there remains limited research on the successful design of these rituals. This study aims to propose a Food Ritual Design Framework that inspires the design of traditional food. The framework was applied in a case study on Sugar Painting, and its applicability and effectiveness were evaluated through a questionnaire survey (n = 133). The survey revealed the successful integration of 47 diverse traditional foods into the framework. Design researchers and practitioners rated the framework highly, giving it an average score of 4.02. This framework provides valuable guidance for designing traditional foods, enabling them to align with their inherent rituals and adapt to the dynamic landscape of future food systems.

Food possesses inherent cultural attributes and serves as a natural medium of connection. This paper introduces a design project for social innovation using food resources: "From Tree to Table" (FTTT). The project is the product of a social innovation course at an art school and lasted for three months. The focus of the project is on the relationship between soft food sovereignty and community transformative change. The Peach Lake Community (PLC) is rich in ecological resources, and a government-level change resulted in differentiation within the community between indigenous residents and recent migrants. FTTT explores the possibility of using the seasonal food, sour jujubes, from the PLC for social innovation. The study found that food, as a medium, can facilitate community transformative change in the non-violent assimilation guided by soft food sovereignty. We propose an implementation model for food co-creation workshops in community educational spaces (5W1H+OE).