Please ask us - conversation mapping as design research : social learning in a verge garden site

Increasingly, small-scale urban agriculture projects are creating new possibilities for how we feed ourselves in cities like Sydney, where our food is largely grown, stored, packaged, portioned, transported, sold and wasted in thoroughly unsustainable though conventional ways. These projects are leading indicators of a widespread interest in exploring ways of living and working that go against the grain of massive, resource-intensive and embedded systems of supply, like that of industrial food. Small-scale urban agriculture projects involve socio-cultural practices that may be relatively new and fragile, and in need of material and social support. This situation generates new roles for designers and design researchers, in applying their expertise and judgment to support the redirection of work and lifestyles against the momentum of current conventions. Mindful of these perspectives, this paper explores the role that conversation mapping could play in both documenting and facilitating the dynamics of social learning in urban agriculture projects. We focus on a modest verge garden in an inner-Sydney suburb, which contests a range of current conventions around food provision, waste, streetscape aesthetics and the delineation of public and private space. The garden is an exemplar of the significant dynamics of ‘social learning’ that are reconfiguring the relationship between production and consumption on a small scale, while the mapping activity functions as a way of documenting, disclosing and communicating this learning.