Seed to Feed: Leveraging HCI and Capitalising on Office Environments to Grow Food

Food security is a global concern, but achieving it faces no shortage of challenges. With the world continuing to urbanise, traditional forms of agriculture are diminishing, driving exploration into alternatives methods of food production. Urban farming is becoming a growing phenomenon with individuals investing in methods, such as WindowFarms, Aquafarms and vertical farms as a means of supplementing their food supply. Applications of alternative growing methods have centred on domestic settings or localised communities, and limited research has explored urban farming methods used in workplaces. This paper presents the findings of four alternative food growing applications within a workplace, to explore the viability of future implementations within similar workplace contexts. The findings from this study can be used to better understand the sociotechnical challenges of growing food in unique urban environments, presenting opportunities for urban farming to occur in a variety of settings that are not limited to domestic applications.