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Queuing for Waste: Sociotechnical Interactions within a Food Sharing Community

Queuing for Waste: Sociotechnical Interactions within a Food Sharing Community Katie Berns, Chiara Rossitto, Jakob Tholander CHI '21: The 2021 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Session: Transformation and Sustainability / Activism and Critique Abstract This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how - through the work of volunteers - surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community's activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers' concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events. DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445059 WEB:: https://chi2021.acm.org/ Pre-recorded Presentations for the ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 8-13, 2021

ACM SIGCHI

2 years ago
hello i'm katie burns from stockholm university i'm here today to present the paper queueing for waste socio-technical interactions within a food chain community on behalf of my co-authors kiara rosito and jacob to london there's much engaging past work that investigates how digital technologies may be utilized to rescue and redistribute surface food in different settings from charity to commercial however in previous work most cases the exchange of surplus food is centered around a digital plat
form and the majority of interactions take place online we identified queuing as an important aspect of sharing events both in terms of managing the flow of attendees and for communicating activism in this paper we focus explicitly on the situated interactions centered around queuing and the potential role of digital technology within that space these contributions were the result of an ethnographic study of foodshare in copenhagen a grassroots initiative operating in denmark since 2016. food ch
ain copenhagen runs face-to-face food sharing events with the goal of reducing food waste these events are open to anyone who wishes to attend which marks the profound difference from the sharing for charity model that we've seen in other studies our findings reveal how face-to-face food sharing events increase the visibility of food waste as an issue as attendees get the opportunity to see all of the rescued food rather than just their individual share we also found that through the labor of vo
lunteers donated food which would usually go to waste is instead reframed as valuable and shared with attendees as a gift rather than a commodity exchange through monetary direct transactions finally we were able to identify how communities the community shift from traditional queuing mechanisms such as first-come first-served land aggregation to more dynamic mechanisms such as the randomized number system or the picture-based system reflect this notion of sharing food as a gift and support the
communities activists endeavor around food waste throughout the paper we borrow from scholarship on community economies to engage in a discussion on how concepts of commenting and care can help us to rethink cueing we ask designers to reflect on the potential effects of digitally mediated cueing while digitally mediated queuing may make the flow of attendees more efficient for example by digitizing tickets and distributing them before events this could also remove much of the face-to-face intera
ctions that have fold before each event such interactions help to break with individualism and sustain mutual relationships among the different actors taking part in events by considering the value of mutual relationships we highlight how cueing can facilitate commenting that is the possibility to care and manner manage together practices of food distribution moreover we see how queuing of food sharing events can become an opportunity to encounter others and collectively benefit from shared reso
urces rather than simply mundane activity that must be optimized to conclude this paper shows queuing as an important aspect of organizing activism and that cueing practices intertwine with the framers and meanings associated with surplus food with this in mind the paper shows how changes in seemingly mundane practices like queuing can incur significant changes in the dynamic sharing dynamics of a community thank you very much for listening and i'm happy to answer any questions that you may have

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