Sebastian Prost
Innovation Fellow
I am interested in questions of food system democratisation, participatory design, and social justice and social innovation. In my PhD in Digital Civics at Open Lab I am researching sustainable and ethical food networks that are just and accessible for all, in particular for communities in deprived areas. I explore the role of participatory design and digital technology to support processes of food system innovation. My work is collaborative and action-oriented and includes the following strands so far:
- I partnered with a local community centre in the North East of England to explore how a local food hub can address questions of health, environment, justice, and democratic participation.
- I collaborated with a local primary school engaging young people as food citizens in critical questions on our food system.
- I worked with a local community group to design and launch a community garden project.
- Together with colleagues at Open Lab, I co-developed a long-term and open-ended partnership with the above community centre to infrastructure community-commissioned action-research and participatory design projects addressing social challenges.
Tyne Fresh: Creating food democracy through a local food hub
2023
Walking and Talking: Place-based Data Collection and Mapping for Participatory Design with Communities
2023 – DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
2019
Food Democracy for All? Developing a Food Hub in the Context of Socio-Economic Deprivation
2019 – Politics and Governance
Infrastructuring Food Democracy: The Formation of a Local Food Hub in the Context of Socio-Economic Deprivation
2019 – Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
2018
Food democracy in the making: Designing with local food networks
2018 – Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18)
2017
A grand challenge for HCI: food + sustainability
2017 – Interactions