Speculating on Agri- Imaginaries with and through Digital Food

Food and agriculture have long been at the center of popular and scientific or ‘expert’ imaginaries of the future. In presenting alternative visions of desirable or undesirable worlds, agri-imaginaries investigate possibilities across all aspects and dimensions of production and consumption. In imagining alternative futures, we are able to critique and reimagine our current food system.

Meaningful engagement in imagining alternative futures is the goal of speculative design. Speculative design involves developing scenarios based on protypes as a means to explore alternative present and future states by engaging people in critical reflection and facilitating public discussion (Barendregt & Vaage 2021). This paper theorizes how speculative design methodologies can be applied in building and debating food imaginaries that focus on digital food technologies and proposes a structure for operationalizing this process.

Digital food, simply defined as food-related digital engagement, has a significant role to play in achieving sustainable food futures across the domains of production, distribution, representation, and consumption. Digital agriculture is already integrating the key elements of food production with transformative impacts and digitalization is profoundly reconfiguring consumers' relationships with food, with new platforms emerging from already existing, multi-scalar webs of community resilience and sociality. During the Covid-19 pandemic many of these webs played a vital role in provisioning locked-down communities, from providing online deliveries meals to communities in need to reconfiguring disrupted supply chains for local needs.

Digital technology is only a means to an end, however, and technologies are not neutral or universally accessible. Nor do they necessarily invite wide participation in the governance of food systems. How might agri-food researchers employ speculative design to create the spaces, contexts and perceptual bridges (Dunne and Raby 2013) that invite a broad range of imaginative, even radical, perspectives on thinking and doing digital food?