Most of the small but growing number of leaders and full participants do have prior affiliations with the center, either as staff or students of that PDC. Very recently these new leaders hosted several PDCs and other community meet-ups at multiple institutions, thus building the potential to grow and reproduce the permaculture community of practice.During a typical class session, students first learned about the theory behind a permaculture element, observed a working example of that element, then engaged in a design activity. In design activities, students were provided with a set of requirements and tasked to produce a design featuring the permaculture element of topic . Design activities typically featured one element. In both communities, students participated in situated activities to understand how some of the elements of a permaculture design are implemented. The implementation tasks were typically short, around 1-2 hours, but often large projects, taking advantage of the extraman power provided by eager students to learn. Occasionally, PDCs in both communities took students to offsite permaculture locations. At the offsite locations, students encountered the same structures for learning as they did at the community education centers. For example, students learned about greywater at a site where other greywater techniques were in place , learned how to design sustainable polycultures at a site where many polycultures were thriving , plastic nursery plant pot and learned how to install an annual garden at the house of a client . For most off-site class days, students engaged in each of the three kinds of learning experiences .
For both communities, the final design project was a situated learning experience, in which small groups of students created a design for a client with only a brief consultation with the instructor. Clients included private community gardens, public community gardens, schools, homeowners, commercial property owners, and farms. Students went to the site location to do an analysis of the site and to interview the client. Then the groups met to create a design for the site. Groups presented their designs to the class on the final day of the PDCs. In both communities, students engaged in this process concurrent to learning new theory, design techniques, and installation practices. This task was challenging for all students involved as it revealed how much they still needed to learn to engage in the practice as full participants. The primary Live Oak PDC instructor offered students reduced fees for the PDC if they also engaged in short-term apprenticeships. The apprenticeship required students to implement and maintain permaculture elements at the instructor’s local farm and aid the instructor in permaculture design for her commissioned jobs for four hours per week. Newcomers expected that a short-term course would be sufficient for learning how to design and install agroecosystems, but the closing discussion for each PDC revealed that students felt they were far from obtaining the required skills. During informal followup discussions with participants and course instructors, many students said they were still interested in agroecosystems, but did not maintain an involvement in designing, building, or maintaining agroecosystems, meaning they did not continue to engage in legitimate peripheral participation.
Activist research requires dialogue and collective work with activists prior to finalizing research questions and research objectives . During these field studies, I was an activist first and researcher second. I engaged the communities with an activist agenda and supported participants beyond the research, for example, by managing a community website. I argue this stance was important in building trust, fostering a long term commitment and responsibility to both the community and the research, and helping me form an insider perspective and gain a deeper understanding of each other’s goals. Martinez argued that “Activist research, to a greater degree than other research models, depends upon the establishment of a relationship of trust between the researcher and the activists.” Thus, I felt it was necessary to build trust before community members would feel comfortable enough to engage as participants. After building personal relationships, participants were open to engaging in audio-recorded interviews, surveys, and photographs of artifacts. My personal relationships allowed me to engage in spontaneous conversations about my research and gain their opinions of being research participants. Newcomers to the communities also needed to feel accepted by their community before participating in community activities, including research . Many newcomers to the Manzanita permaculture community were unwilling to engage in data collection activities, especially interviews, until they made personal connections with the existing community and especially with me, the researcher.My findings emerged from six forms of qualitative methods, though not all six methods were used in all four phases . As I continued my education, I was able to refine my methods and gather more precise data from the Manzanita community. The methodological triangulation of these inquiries led to compelling themes for information challenges and the requirements for the SAGE Plant Database.
The first method entailed observing both communities as I participated in different roles, including student, facilitator, and volunteer. I recorded my observations by writing notes while participating in PDCs, workshops, and other community events. My early notes were predominately taken from a student perspective. As my research began to take a more defined shape, my participation notes included research-based observations as well. For example, as a student my notes focused on the permaculture concepts I was currently learning, but when I became a facilitator, my notes also reflected how participants engaged with the concepts they learned. At the end of each activity with the Manzanita community I intentionally wrote “thick descriptions” of the day’s events, taking care to provide cultural context and critical thoughts for my observations. A thick description not only describes the observed behavior, but also the context of that behavior including explanations and meanings defined by the participants engaging in the behavior .In HCI, using fictional futures to explore implications for technology design with speculative design or design fiction is an accepted and valued practice. Tanenbaum et al. argue that design fictions, typically films about the future, highlight “values and intellectual commitments associated with a new technology.” Hauser, Desjardin, and Wakkary used design fiction to “unlock people’s imagination, encourage reflection, and inspire action towards a more sustainable reality” at their university. Dunne and Raby use speculative designs to “question the meaning of technology itself” in effort increase the opportunity of achieving desirable futures. Baumer et al. created and curated abstracts for papers that could be published at CHI in 2039 to explore “what will constitute rigorous, publishable research in the future.” In this dissertation, the process of constructing a design future allowed participants to critically analyze the long term values of Manzanita sustainable agriculture community and how those values could and should be supported and represented by information technology. Permaculture designers create sustainable polycultures that naturally regenerate and support long-term goals – goals with a time horizon of many human generations or longer. Through informal conversations with community members, I learned that environmental and food system sustainability were long-term goals for participants. Most participants believed that societal collapse was imminent or would be imminent if modern societal norms, seedling starter pot and in particular consumer behavior, did not change. Most participants said that natural disaster, ecological crisis, and resource depletion were the most imminent threats to society. Many said that financial upheaval had already started and was going to get worse. Participants believed that by engaging in permaculture, they could reduce their and their communities ecological imprint, foster the regeneration of natural resources, and be prepared for a collapse. Dewey defines a public as a group of people addressing a common problem, or the indirect effects of a common problem, in the same manner.
Just as publics are constructed to address a common problem, they in turn dissolve as the common problem is solved. The participating communities were, in effect, publics using permaculture and agroecosystem techniques to address food security, climate change, and environmental degradation. Sustainable polycultures come into maximum effect decades after they are planted because the public is attempting to address issues both in the present, but also issues they anticipate occurring in the long-term. Sixteen participants attended the three-hour workshop, which was also audio recorded to enable later transcription. I engaged participants of the Manzanita community in a critical exercise that yielded a distant, desirable design future grounded in their community’s values and practices. First, I prompted participants to create a high-level design for a three-acre plot of land in the UCI Arboretum. During this exercise, we highlighted the values embedded in the present system. Then, I asked participants to imagine the environmental, socio-cultural, technological, and economic future of the surrounding metropolitan area in 30 and 70 years, and how that would impact their modern agroecosystem design process. In each future scenario exercise, we first individually noted the natural environment, the social community, our personal lives , the role of technology in creating agroecosystems, and a brief justification for the scenario. Next, we shared and discussed each of these scenarios. The audio was transcribed in the week following the workshop. This method was demonstrated at the 2018 Workshop on Longer-term Design Thinking at the University of Washington in Seattle . I presented the resulting 30-year design future in the Prologue of this dissertation. All data for the 30-year design future came from the “Creating a Shared Design Future” workshop. I coded and categorized the data to understand the long-term values and visions regarding technology, agriculture, environment, and social structure. I utilized the emerging themes regarding long-term technology, agriculture, environment, and social values and visions to guide the formation of a shared likely future scenario and to iterate on the concept of a suite of sociotechnical systems for the community. In addition to transcribing the audio, I referred back to the individual participant’s hand-written worksheets for clarification of points made in the group conversation. In theory, one shared desirable scenario could also be created if the group felt the likely scenario was distinct from a desirable one. After completing this process, I shared my synthesis of the design future with the participants inviting feedback and changes, and two participants made edits or otherwise provided clarifications.Gathering and synthesizing data are the primary tasks in the first two steps of the permaculture design process – needs and site analysis. There are three resources from which this information can be collected: client, designer , or online. Information from the client is mostly to help establish a vision for the site in the need’s analysis, but the client may also have information pertinent to the site analysis. The designer will derive much information about the site by simply looking at the site during the observation process, but precise information usually requires some form of measurement, such as elevation change. Online datasets are valuable resources for site analysis information because they contain data that otherwise requires expensive equipment or a refined skill set to accurately collect. Unfortunately, these data are typically available for a scale larger than the site . Although a wealth of information resources exists, participants had difficulty determining what data should come from which resources. For example, Pauline, a landscape designer, suggested that one of the most pressing issues to ask a client is, “where does the sun fall?” However, a client may not be fully aware of the sun patterns on their property. Terrance, the instructor of Manzanita PDC-2014 explained, that a person can use a compass to “calculate the trajectory of the sun to know where it is going to arc and determine how the plants will be exposed to the sunlight.” There are also online tools to gather observable information that might be hard to deduce in a short visit like, for example, climate data. Terrance described which details needed to come from the client: “From observation we know where the sun is, we know what the soil is like, we know what is growing, but what we don’t know is what [the client] wants.” Because newcomers do not have refined experience in observation, creating site surveys, and generating designs from client requirements, they are inclined to ask clients for any information they might need to create a design, like environmental data or even design decisions .However, a client’s time is valuable, so it is essential for the designer to use the client’s time to determine the client’s vision and other information that is not available from other information resources.