Everyone Deserves a Seat at the Table
How might we reimagine our food systems for greater equity and resilience through participatory design?
Research Snapshot
From August 2021 to May 2022, I conducted my graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examining how participatory, people-powered design can support solutions for ending hunger.
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The main research objectives were to develop a deeper understanding of why the United States is failing to address hunger, explore if and how participatory design practices are being used today to advance community leadership within local food systems, and uncover the challenges and opportunities in this field.
What I discovered is that there is no “recipe” to effect meaningful change in food systems. Participatory design is just one of several tools available to address hunger, and its implementation must be tailored to meet the specific needs of each community. However, certain “ingredients” should be made essential to every process and cannot be left out or substituted, including the need to establish trust, build relationships, and show up authentically in ways that acknowledge and confer power.
This study serves as an actionable resource for understanding the prerequisites for community-driven change as more organizations strive to work directly with people with lived experience and aspire to redesign food systems. The final outcome of this thesis was a participatory mise en place prototype for making equitable change in the food system. I'm now working to further shape and expand this product in collaboration with design and food system experts.
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You can download the full publication on the MIT libraries portal or review the snapshot below.
My sincere thanks go out to the 75+ leaders who took the time to speak with me and share their work and wisdom, as well as the 92 people who thoughtfully completed surveys. Without their contributions, this body of work would not have been possible.
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Motivation for the Topic
Participatory design involves co-designing with future users. In other words, it's when you design with the people you seek to serve not just for).
Brown and Wyatt said in 2010:
“Time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the client's or customer's needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback. Even when people do go into the field, they may enter with preconceived notions of what the needs and solutions are.”
Food insecurity is an interesting participatory design challenge because solutions to addressing hunger have been critiqued for being disconnected from the communities they seek to serve. Despite having over thousands of organizations in the US dedicated to the problem, hunger rates have remained consistent for decades.
This realization led me to my central research objectives, which were to understand why we are failing to address hunger in the United States, to explore if and how participatory design practices are being used to address food insecurity today, and what barriers and opportunities exist when leading this work in the future.
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Methods
To meet these goals, a literature review was conducted along with a two-part mixed-methods study conducted with Sheila Pontis from the Integrated Design and Management Program and Jason Jay, Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan.
The study included 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with food leaders, participatory designers, and leaders using participatory design in the food system followed by two surveys to expand and validate interview findings. Participant consent was obtained for each part of the research when relevant, and the study was considered exempt from human subjects review by the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects.
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After the interviews concluded, I analyzed and coded the information using both thematic analysis and open-ended coding. I then compared interview and questionnaire results to explore emergent themes in greater detail, which informed the development of the participatory mise en place.
For this study, I opted not to interview anyone experiencing food insecurity and chose to use Laura Nader's approach of “studying up” given the time constraints and history of extraction faced by communities experiencing food insecurity. Coined by Nader in the 60s, studying up calls on researchers to stop only researching “the marginalized,” and include powerful institutions and cultures as study subjects - studying the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty” (Barabas, 2021).
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I focused on leaders in positions of power who are actively working to address food insecurity or lead participatory design efforts to better understand current challenges and opportunities. In spite of not being part of a systematic sampling strategy, some interviewees and food survey respondents also said they had lived experience with food insecurity, which provided insights into these issues as well.
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Key Learnings
Food insecurity is not about food, but rather its root causes: income inequality, systemic racism, and a lack of effective social services. ​
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Too many actors benefit from the current system, creating a lack of political will for change.
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There is increased desire for greater community participation but what that looks like and what constitutes "participation" varies widely from organization to organization.
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Hunger is a symptom, not addressing the root causes is the disease
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Food insecurity is not really about food, it’s about income inequality, systemic racism, and a lack of effective social services.
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Charity is an incomplete response to justice
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Top-down organizations are not as impactful as they should be.
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Many people value participation, but funding, time, and trust are real barriers to engaging the community.
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There is a tendency to blame or problematize people experiencing hunger but people experiencing hunger are the ones best positioned to solve their own problems
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Good intentions are not actions.
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Many people think they are doing participatory design in the food system but what that means is varied and lacking in depth.
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Systemic changes should not be prescripted top-down but led by people with lived expertise who are best positioned to address their own problems.
Why Participation is Lacking
Study participants were asked why participatory engagement is not happening more in practice, despite its longstanding discussion in the literature since Arnstein's work in 1969. This was a core question in almost every interview and survey, and all groups had similar answers with substantial overlap. Funding, building trust or mistrust, and time were the biggest barriers for each group in leading participatory design or community engagement, see figure 30 at right.
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The Definition of Participation Varies Widely
The study aimed to uncover what community engagement actually looks like in organizations today and what people mean when they say they are “engaging the community.” Interestingly, the classification of "participation" and "community engagement" varied widely across participants. What one organization considers participatory design, another might only see as token engagement.
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To better understand the variety of participatory approaches, I mapped how survey respondents and interviewees reported engaging and working with people experiencing hunger, see figure 32.
Referencing the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, the CDC’s Community Engagement Continuum, and Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation, I created a continuum ranging from less engagement (left) to more engagement (right) plotting participants’ engagement activities along the spectrum. As participation increases and tokenism decreases, the color scheme deepens. Points increase in size in correlation to the number of times an engagement technique was mentioned.
The variation could be because many types of engagement frameworks exist and there is no roadmap for how to lead meaningful community-led work. As I-FPD-67 shares, “there’s just no standard for how to do it.”
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This lack of an instruction manual can be a major hurdle that keeps many organizations from doing the hard but necessary work to seek community input. I-PD 5, Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at an urban design studio said, “people don't do it because it's hard. You look and sound like you don't know what you're talking about. Cause you don't, and it's still complex at the end of the day.” This may be a driving force in organizations’ unwillingness to try because embracing the “messiness” as I-PD 5 puts it can be vulnerable.
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What People Are Excited About
Survey respondents also had the opportunity to share what makes them most excited and feeling hopeful in an open-ended response. In the open-ended responses, engaging the community and the ideas generated in this process were mentioned the most. For example, 10 respondents shared that they were excited about building and sustaining more relationships with the community. 9 respondents shared feeling hopeful about communities' self-organizing and demanding representation.
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Research Output
With this information in mind, I intended to create a “cookbook,” outlining recipes for how to lead equity-based participatory design in the food system as a design framework for addressing food insecurity.
However, as I moved through the study it became clear that there is no single recipe that can be followed and to prescribe one as a framework, is to entirely miss the point. There is an ongoing myth that designers create universal methods that can then be applied anywhere and by anyone. However, true participatory design has to be shaped to the unique needs and contexts of local communities.
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Essential Ingredients
While there is no universal recipe for participatory design in the food system, designers shared very concrete practices they considered "absolutely essential" to leading participatory processes. Just as most cakes require flour, sugar, eggs, fat, and leavening, there are mandatory elements that cannot be left out when co-creating more equitable solutions to fighting food insecurity.
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Considering the overwhelming volume of existing information on food systems change and participatory design, I sought to identify "key ingredients" from the insights participants shared. 15 final ingredients were chosen according to how frequently they appeared in interviews and their significance.
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​​In order to bring these learnings and themes to life, I went back to the interviewee that shared that core insight and asked them to illustrate what the word and ingredient meant to them. Each of the ingredients you see here is illustrated by a different study participant and some by myself, see left.
A Mise En Place for Change
This led me to the final output of this thesis - a participatory “mise en place” for making equitable change in the food system. Mise en place means to put in place or gather ingredients before cooking, and this final output includes the most essential ingredients for change agents as they seek to cook up change in the food system.
As someone who personally appreciates simplifying the complex, my hope is that this mise en place connects key concepts in a way that is digestible and easy to use.
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I used mise en place as a framing technique because it symbolizes the preparation and care that a chef puts into their craft before the hard work of cooking begins, without prescribing any one recipe. By acknowledging these ingredients and spending time to prepare, practitioners may find creating and navigating a participatory process more equitable and impactful.
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I articulate this mise en place as the first step in the journey and pair it with a list of actions any “chef” should be ready and willing to take to move from theory to practice.
It is then followed by a prototype participatory process informed by interview learnings. This process is not a fixed recipe but food for thought from which to build. As a simile, this process is demonstrated within the framing of a holiday meal with friends, colleagues, or family (see left).
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Next Steps
Working in collaboration with Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau, Founder & Principal of ACBC Consulting, and Designer and Strategist, Angélica Chíncaro, I’m working on expanding this concept and designing a user-friendly version of these learnings that can be utilized by food system leaders and organizations. You can learn more about our tool in progress here.
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If you are interested in testing an early prototype or providing feedback, please get in touch.
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We expect this resource to be ready in late 2023. It will be sold to food organizations and all proceeds (after production costs) will be donated to a community-initiated and community-led food organization.