Future Supa is a digitally enhanced, physical dramatic play space set in 2080. Co-designed with stakeholders along the food supply chain using the artificial intelligence DALL-E 2, Future Supa will provoke visitors to consider current and future food production challenges as we attempt to feed a growing population. The contrastingly playful and unsettling experience will encourage visitors to consider the question: In the face of a shifting climate, how can we grow more food with less land, less water and less inputs?
Research – SPECULATIVE DESIGN – CO-DESIGN – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Project Overview
Future Supa is an interactive, digitally enhanced, physical speculative design experience. The work invites visitors to step into the world of Terra, a six year old child living in 2080. In Terra’s world outdoor play is greatly restricted due to increased heat; consumerism has been curbed to try and sustain the global population within planetary boundaries and a dramatically shifting climate means fresh food is a thing of the past.
Terra spends most of her days inside. To reduce the boredom Terra’s parents saved their Sustainment Points, accrued by shopping at their local super market, Future Supa to surprise her on her 6th birthday. They purchased her a dramatic play market stall. They stocked the stall with felt foods, collected from the store’s latest food education promotion, to encourage the uptake of fresh foods starting to become available at Future Supa once more.
Each piece of play food has been co-designed using DALL-E 2 with a stakeholder along the food supply chain including growers, agronomists, food technologists and consumers. The foods build on current concerns around food production impacted by climate change, supply chain disruptions and global unrest.
Visitors to the exhibition can scan the QR codes attached to the foods. They are taken to the Future Supa website where they can listen to sound bites from the co-design interview participants to learn how they envision how these foods were produced.
The Problem
Climate change is placing increasing pressures on growers at the same time that increased food insecurity is placing demands for higher yields produced with less of everything: less land, less inputs, less water.
Whilst there’s a growing understanding that current food production systems need to change, growers and the agriculture industry often aren’t consulted in the design and ideation phase of developing ag tech or implementing systems change. The pressure for growers to adopt sustainable practices is often not coupled with the support or understanding of the complexities that surround making these changes.
Producers feel that the crops they grow and practices they implement are dictated by consumer purchasing choices and willingness to pay for goods. Consumers feel that sustainable food production and variety of produce available / ethical and sustainable fibre production is the responsibility of growers and beyond their control.
There is an opportunity to engage both consumers and growers in the realisation that redesigning food and fibre production systems requires ideation, input and collaboration from all actors within the system: growers, consumers, ag industry , food processors, retailers, textilers etc. Showcasing growers voices and inviting growers and consumers to engage in a playful re-imagining of food and fibre systems could afford a richer, more ethical and sustainable future of farming.
Future Supa was developed in response to a question posed at the Agribusiness Australia panel discussion “Agribusiness and Food Industry Tech” held at Clayton Utz in May 2022.
Panelists and attendees alike were posed the question “how are we going to feed more people with less land, less water and less inputs?”.
The question ties in to Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger by 2030.
At present the world is not on track to achieve this goal with the United Nations warning “a profound change of the global food and agriculture system is needed if we are to nourish the more than 690 million people who are hungry today – and the additional 2 billion people the world will have by 2050. Increasing agricultural productivity and sustainable food production are crucial to help alleviate the perils of hunger.”
The Process
As I have progressed through my degree I have learnt to follow the Double Diamond and Design Thinking processes. More recently I have been viewing these as guideposts, instead following something more akin to what Ryan Ford calls the Design Odyssey:
“It is not a rigid structure with steps to follow, but a path you discover along the way with dangers, villains, and wisdom to be gained, and you often wind up right back where you started.” (Ford, 2022).
I went through countless iterations and level of fidelity of my designs, brainstormed, conducted research and tried out new technologies. I also had several detours, times I had to pivot when faced with an insurmountable barrier and chances to push my project in directions beyond what I had considered in my initial self drafted brief.
Following my initial literature review and ideation sessions, I designed a research program consisting of participant recruitment email and call script templates, moderation guides based on participant type and an activity to help participants craft their DALL-E 2 prompt.
A total of 11 participants took part in the project from across the food supply chain. They were recruited through cold emailing member of Slow Food South Coast, leveraging my existing network and through callouts on LinkedIn.
The participant break down consists of:
1 x Supermarket Point of Sales
1 x Agronomist
2 x Food Technologists
5 x Producers
2 x Consumers
Each participant took part in a 30 minute qualitative interview exploring past attitudes to food consumption, current challenges faced in food production and the perceived future of food production and supply in terms of risks and opportunities.
Following the interviews the participants took part in a 30 minute co-design session using FigJam and the artificial intelligence image generator DALL-E 2.
The artificial intelligence system was chosen as a co-design tool to alleviate some of the anxieties around art making that can be seen in traditional co-design practices such as collage and drawing.
At the start of the session participants answered a series of questions designed to help them visualise and describe future food. These questions were both visual and situational in nature, to help participants imagine their food in context.
A series of partially pre-written prompts were provided to participants to insert their own descriptions into. These prompts had been pre-tested on DALL-E and had consistently produced high quality images. They focused on the style of image output and defined that the image to be created should depict a food on a white background.
The prompts were entered into DALL-E 2 to generate images. Participants were able to generate as many iterations as they liked. They were encouraged to edit and refine their prompt to generate an image that they felt represented the food they had been imagining.
Participants then selected an image from the iterations to be physically made for the Future Supa market stall. The image was used as a visual aid in further discussion around the production factors that could have changed in the future to shape the creation or design of their food.
Each of the interviews was then uploaded to the research software tool Dovetail where it was transcribed and tagged following a bottom up tagging taxonomy. The tags and highlights were then synthesised using affinity mapping to generate a series of findings.
These findings were used to generate ideas for speculative props that would be used to create the Future Supa space. Each prop was physically made and includes a QR code that when scanned leads back to the Future Supa website. The site hosts one to two participant quotes that exemplified the overarching sentiment or concept behind each key finding.
These prompts include:
My First Book of Farming, created using DALL-E 2, Adobe Photoshop and Canva. This prop explores changes to farming production and practices.
UV Indicator clock. A play on toddler sleep trainers created using Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and a laser cutters. It links to shifts in growing conditions.
Eftpos machine. Created using Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and a laser cutters. It links to concerns around the cost of production.
Physical foods. Created using felt, free hand pattern cutting and sewing. These link to the individual participant interviews.
The Detour
At around the mid point in this project I heavily invested my time in working with AR and teaching myself to train a machine learning model. Whilst I had some successes I eventually reached a barrier in my coding ability to be able to anchor the augmented reality images exactly over the machine learning generated frames.
This reaching of my current abilities was frustrating but one that made me pause to reconsider the user experience.
In using augmented reality and image detection I would create a scenario where visitors to the exhibition would have to download and install an app to access the experience. This would rely on them to perform a potentially cognitively difficult task whilst in a highly distracting exhibition space.
It also meant that visitors had to have a phone with camera capable enough and battery life strong enough to interact with the image recognition and augmented reality sprites.
Whilst the augmented reality experience felt like it would be fun I also realised it didn’t really “add” anything to the experience in terms of sharing information. I recognised that it might act as a barrier to interacting with the experience and that it might also take away from the tangible nature of the experience.
I decided not to invest further hours into learning to code to solve the problem of positioning my AR anchors over machine learning generated frames at this time. In doing so I simplified the design outcome, reduced barriers to use and increased accessibility by using a technology visitors are already familiar with, QR Codes.
The Outcome
The project aimed to find an interactive way to engage people with research findings and to create outputs that would provoke an audience to consider their part in shaping future food production systems.
Future Supa is an interactive speculative design experience considering the future of food production: Growing more food with less land, less inputs and less water. Participants are invited into the year 2080, into a play supermarket set up in a child’s bedroom. Each piece of play food has been co-designed using DALL-E 2 with a stakeholder along the food supply chain including growers, agronomists, food technologists and consumers. The foods build on current concerns around food production impacted by climate change, supply chain disruptions and global unrest.
In addition to the physical space, Future Supa is also a website, designed to be the online shopping experience of the fictitious supermarket, Future Supa. The website presents soundbites of interviews with stakeholders along the food supply chain. It showcases the speculative props in the form of rewards from a point program and also presents written research findings from both interviews and the literature review.
Deliverables:
Finished prototype
Two page instructional sheet
Promotional flyer
User experience / testing report
Three minute project video
Full prototype walk through video
Exhibition poster (template provided)
Reflection
Future Supa is by far my biggest solo project to date. It had many “moving parts” including physical and digital designs.
I have learnt though this project that I have developed a diverse and useful skillset in my time studying at QUT that could be applied in a range of contexts.
I have learnt to recognise when I have hit my limits in terms of capability or time, but not to give up at that moment, instead pivot and look for a simpler way. Simple design is best, nothing that doesn’t strictly have to be there, and the same applies to using skills you have available to you. There’s no points for over complicating things and you’re probably just going to over complicate them for your end user too.
Working on Future Supa has further confirmed for me how much I like working in the space of complex systems and agriculture. Whilst it’s an industry that is only in its infancy in terms of adopting technology it means that there is a lot of space to shape what a technology enhanced future might look like.
Working in a problem space I care deeply about kept me highly motivated, creative and engaged, even when the work was challenging or I thought I had hit my energy limits.
I have had the chance to see the “magic” of technology inspiring people to think differently and creatively in this project, to question what is possible. In co-designing using DALL-E 2 I had the chance to expose a number of stakeholders to a technology they might never have experienced otherwise. It was an absolute joy seeing the delight and wonder it brought to both my participants and myself as the tool afforded us the ability to visualise concepts we could only imagine and describe the fringes of. The rich conversations this tool provoked around the future of food production and security is something I would like to explore further in the future.
Cait Hopper
Cait Hopper is an interaction designer whose work explores the intersection of agriculture, technology and sustainability. She has presented at the Futurescan 5 Conscious Communities Conference at the University of Leeds; co-presented at the 2nd Digital Fashion Innovation E-Symposium at Manchester Metropolitan University; co-presented at Re-Imagining Global Fashion Business hosted by Coventry University London and co-authored an article in the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. In 2021 Cait won an Interaction Design Association pitch competition and people’s choice award.
