Designing to Support Community Gardens by Going Beyond Community Gardens

Community gardens connect to many organizations in order to receive and offer resources and services. The complex sociotechnical systems in which community gardens inhabit bring both opportunities and challenges for designers who endeavor to support them. In this study, we investigated three community gardens to explore the organizational connections that support them. Our aim is to articulate an expanded understanding of a community garden as an end-user that includes a diverse connection of stakeholders. By revealing the multiple connections they make, our results show that the community gardens in our study have established three paths to connections with diverse organizations. The reasons for these connections include community inclusion, assistance, peer-support and administration. In these connections, the roles community gardens play are also distinct. In addition, a community garden’s role is fluid rather than fixed. Based on these findings, we propose design implications to support community gardens beyond the gardens themselves and three scenarios to illustrate opportunities for design. We thus suggest researchers to broaden the existing limited focus on gardeners and their practices in gardens. Our work reveals a new space that design and HCI could support to promote urban agriculture and civic engagement. By providing practical design scenarios as illustrations to support community garden that are actively embedded in complex sociotechnical systems, this work responds to the theme of the session DesignX: Acting to Complexity which calls for designers to “play an active role in implementation, and develop solutions through small, incremental steps.”