Abstract
The 2023 flagship publication as part of The State of the World series of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations addresses ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World’ across the rural-urban continuum. The world is not on track to achieve its Sustainability Development Goal 2 (SDG 2), ‘Zero Hunger by 2030’. We are at a very different place from when the transformative commitment to end world hunger was made six years ago. The COVID-19 pandemic was an onset to the intensification of the inadequacies and vulnerabilities of the global food system, including production, distribution and consumption. Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean have been identified as critical zones of insecurity by the UN and FAO.
This document reports on the Participatory Design of an appropriate waste management system in the complex socio-technical context of Johannesburg, South Africa. It proposes a research and innovation framework model for the design of a sustainable organic waste management system tailored to Small-Scale Urban Farms (SSUFs) in Johannesburg, piloted at the Centre for Ecological Intelligence at the University of Johannesburg’s APB campus. Research indicates that the concept of SSUF is ideally positioned to elicit change within its context. The hybrid research framework, developed in this study, advocates a Participatory Design approach, underpinned by three design theories: 'Appropriate Technology', 'Design for Sustainability’, and ‘Socio-Technical Systems Design'. It proposes a pilot model of how technology can be appropriately integrated into similar complex social and environmental ecosystems to yield high value for people and nature. Central to the study, are the participants, who have informed the decisions through the method of Participatory Design. This project is a response to the observation that there is a lack of Socio-Technical System innovations appropriate for developing SSUF contexts, perpetuating limited productivity, social inequality, weak resource management and Food Insecurity. An approach to this problem, that remains largely untapped, resides in the field of Industrial Design, specifically using participatory methods and a hybrid theoretical model. The historical practice of Industrial Design is also challenged where inherited trends of production, consumption and relations to technology directly oppose the responsibilities of ecology conservation and resource recovery that are followed in this Design Research.
This project used Appropriate Technology transfer methods by mapping complex social and manufacturing ecosystems within a context and promoting synergistic resource-conscious solutions that inspired the co-development of an organic matter processing technology, delivered within the research context for ongoing evaluation. This provided a framework for design practice that could be used in similar contexts seeking to appropriately incorporate technology about ecosystems. This study was used to demonstrate an example of an iterative design process of a developmental socio-technic innovation framework for an appropriate organic waste management system within the University of Johannesburg’s APB campus.