Agri-Social Technology

A decade ago, we set out to explore questions around food, community, technology, and sustainable business through a collaborative project with a local community in inner-city Dublin, Ireland. You can read about it here.

Why revisit this project today? Three reasons compel me to return to this work. First, I've noticed increasing content on LinkedIn—particularly from UN Innovation sources—that resonates with our experience. I want to capture the learning, lessons, and insights from this project and communicate them to others exploring similar territories or facing comparable challenges. Second, I want to contextualize this work within our contemporary understanding of the issues it tackled, giving names to concepts, theories, and practices that may not have existed or been widely understood at the time. Finally, I want to address some lingering tensions and systemic observations that this process surfaces.

This is a reflection piece that revisits the project as critical design practice, connecting it to contemporary conversations around community infrastructure, social innovation, social business, community development, social justice, and community and systemic resilience. It highlights enduring tensions encountered during the project, acknowledges areas for improvement, and identifies the mindsets that persist today. To bring this reflection up to date, I've incorporated recent research, terminology, theories, and practices that have emerged since the project's inception.

Some of the topics to be discussed:

Political Economy: Power dynamics, resource distribution, economic models Participatory Action Research: Community-engaged methodology, collaborative knowledge creation Philosophy: Ethics, values, epistemology, knowledge production Systems Thinking: Interconnections, complexity, emergence, holistic understanding Care Ethics: Relationality, maintenance work, sustaining communities Transition Studies: Systemic change, transformation pathways, social-ecological shifts Regenerative Design: Beyond sustainability, restoration, life-affirming systems Resilience Theory: Adaptive capacity, community strength, responding to change Commons Theory: Collective resource management, shared governance, commoning practices

[ Update coming soon ]