From September 6 – 19th the growBot Garden project will be participating in the 01SJ Festival, in San Jose California, hosting a series of public workshops and events.

In the spirit of “Build Your Own World,” the question Public Design Workshop asks through its growBot Garden workshops is whether design and engineering can play a role in subverting the culture and excessive practices of modern, gigantic-scale, corporate farming, shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture.

These workshops and events draw from practices of participatory and critical design, social practice art, tactical media, and hacking. More than simply a discursive space, they are hands-on design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. Specifically, they bring together designers, artists, farmers and other food producers, engineers, and the interested public to ask—and prototype: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture?

Topics of the growBot Garden workshops include: Cucumber Robotics, Mapmaking for Urban Foraging and Farming, Clandestine Environmental Sensing, Remote Deployment and Monitoring of Illicit Urban Agriculture, and Cheese Computing.

In addition, a small-scale model testing garden within the workshop area will enable hands-on experimentation with environmental sensing devices and actuation to understand how they can be used to monitor basic conditions of agricultural production, such as temperature, soil moisture, soil ph, etc.

The outcome of the workshops will be a public presentation of the speculative design proposals and prototypes co-delivered by the design team and local participants and a mixed-media installation that documents the workshop activities.

Form more information, join our mailing list
or contact carl[dot]disalvo[at]lcc[dot]gatech[dot]edu
and see:
01SJ Out of The Garage, Into the World program guide
01SJ Festival