Negotiating sustainable futures in communities through participatory speculative design and experiments in living

This paper responds to sustainable HCI’s call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local efects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collec- tive resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of efectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable spec- ulative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated par- ticipatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.