=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1203/GH-report
|storemode=property
|title=Green Hackathon: Hacking for Sustainable Food
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1203/GH-report.pdf
|volume=Vol-1203
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ict4s/Zapico14a
}}
==Green Hackathon: Hacking for Sustainable Food==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1203/GH-report.pdf
Green Hackathon
Hacking for Sustainable Food
Jorge Luis Zapico
KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, Stockholm, Sweden
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
zapico@kth.se
!!
Abstract— The ICT4S Green Hackathon was an event
! also a de-facto focus on developing, meaning that the results
exploring the use of information and communications cannot be only a neat idea in a powerpoint, and code and
technologies in sustainable food production and consumption, working prototypes are more highly valued. This is part of the
where developers, designer and problem owners met for creating aforementioned hands-on approach which is central in the
prototypes and applications for a whole day. This article presents hacker ethic [3].
the concept, implementation, results and lessons learned from
this event. During the ICT4S 2014 conference, a Green Hackathon
was organised as a workshop activity the 23rd of August,
Keywords— hackathon, food, sustainability, sustainable HCI. located at R1, a dismantled experimental nuclear reactor
underground at KTH in Stockholm. This time the event was
I. INTRODUCTION focused on sustainable food production and consumption, and
A hackathon is a portmanteau of “hack” and “marathon”, organised by the Centre for Sustainable Communications at
an event to hack for an extended amount of time. In these KTH, as part of the project From Data to Sustainable Practices,
events, enthusiasts meet and work with software and/or in collaboration with COOP Sweden and supported by OKFN
hardware projects for a limited but long period of time, e.g. 24 Sweden & Open Sustainability WG [11].
hours without rest. The reference to “hack” is not to hacking as
in computer crime [1], but to the hacker ethic [2], which
defines a hacker as someone who "programs enthusiastically",
who believes that computing and information sharing is a
positive good and who believes it is an ethical duty to facilitate
access to computers and computing resources [3,4,5].
These events have gained popularity in later years and
many hackathons are organised both by companies and other
organisations. Some are focused around a technology or
application (like Facebook [6] or Linux [7]), while other events
focus around a specific problem area or topic (like Random
hacks of kindness [8] or Hack for Sweden [9]). A key idea of
these events is a hands-on approach, focusing on producing
workable functionality, prototypes or applications at the end of
the event. Many times there can be a competition component,
where the results are presented at the end of the event, winners
are selected and prizes may be distributed. The focus of the
event in the prizes and competition can vary between different
hackathons, in some the prizes the main driving force while in Fig 1.Picture of the Green Hackathon
others the competition is only symbolic.
This text documents the concepts and ideas behind this
Green Hackathon is a series of hackathons that started in Green Hackathon and its results, and it will present and discuss
Stockholm in 2011 focusing on using information and some of the lessons learned from the event.
communication technologies (ICT) with a sustainability
purpose [10]. After the first event in 2011 there has been a II. FOOD, SUSTAINABILITY & ICT
number of Green Hackathons and associated events organised The focus of this hackathon on food was due to several
in different cities, e.g. in London, Helsinki, Berlin, Athens, reasons, but the main motivation was that while food
Zürich, Fukushima, and a coming one in Tokyo. These events production and consumption is one of our main environmental
have been sometimes organised with help of the original impacts, in previous Green Hackathon the focus has been
organisers and other times independently by local groups, but mostly in energy (electricity, transportation, etc), while food
the events shared the common concept umbrella, graphic has been for the most part neglected.
profile and name. The main restrictions of a Green Hackathon
is that the results created need to focus on sustainability, and Food production and consumption have become a major
for the most part involving some kind of ICT solution. There is driver behind environmental degradation, such as climate
The Green Hackathon was financed by the Vinnova
Excellence Centre for Sustainable Communications, with
support from COOP Sweden.
change, biodiversity loss and degradation of land and • Software tools, such as a website, mobile application,
freshwater. According to Foley et al [12] agriculture must be visualisation, etc.
transformed to be sustainable and must deliver sufficient
amounts of food for the growing population (both through • Hardware applications, such as Arduino based electronics.
increased efficiency and dietary changes) and also cut • Tangible design prototypes, that demonstrated a use of
greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80%; counteract technology in a physical context.
biodiversity loss; reduce water use and phase out pollution
from agricultural chemicals. • Stories and new knowledge, gained from the collection and
visualisation of data (data journalism).
The research area of ICT4S and sustainable HCI has
focused mostly on electricity and energy, but there is a growing The event was a one-day activity, starting in the morning
interest in the area of sustainable food [13,14]. For instance, with a keynote and the presentation of the event. Afterwards
researchers have been looking at the possibilities of increasing there was an exercise for networking, where the participants
sustainability by using technology to help changing users food did a round of “speed-dating”, introducing themselves and
behaviour, wanting to close the intention-behavior gap existing discussing possible ideas. Then the participants could pitch
between the attitudes and values around sustainable food hack ideas and based on these pitches they grouped themselves
consumption and the actual consumption practices [15]. into different teams. This hackathon was different than
Examples of efforts include using technology for visualising previous ones in that most of the participants had not a clear
the carbon footprint of food [16] and food-miles [17]. An idea of what to develop nor were part of an existing group, so
especially interesting topic of research is the reduction of food the networking process was very active. The hackathon had 23
waste in households, as it is estimated that around one third of participants, 5 women and 18 men, from diverse (mostly
food produced is thrown away [18]. ICT has been used as a european) countries. Roughly around half of the participants
way of making this waste visible. Ganglbauer et al [19] created were part of the ICT4S conference and working as researchers,
an intervention where a camera was installed in the fridge in while the rest were coming mostly from the local community
different households to record food use and stimulate of designers and developers.
reflection. Thieme et al [20] present a study on an augmented
waste bin that takes pictures of the waste disposed and upload
them to an application to motivate reflection on the users waste
practices. Farr-Wharton et al [21] present a prototype that aims
to reduce food waste by increasing the knowledge and
awareness of the existing food stock at home.
III. THE HACKATHON
Based on this background and existing applications, the
idea of this hackathon was to explore new ways of using ICT to
mitigate the problems and find new solutions. The hackathon
had two main rules for the results:
• To use information and communication technologies.
• In the topic of food and sustainability.
Some more concrete topics were provided as inspiration:
• Using technologies for helping farmers with organic Fig 2. Team working during the hackathon.
growing practices.
• Promote more sustainable food practices (organic, local, After the groups were formed, they moved to the sitting
seasonal, vegetable-based..) areas to keep developing the ideas and start working in
practice. The “hacking” time was around eight hours. This time
• Communication of added value of organic food, creating was shorter than in previous hackathons, for instance the
connection between food producers and consumers. original Green Hackathon ran for 24hours.
• Use of new technologies for interventions at After the hack time was over, the groups presented the
supermarkets promoting more sustainable food practices. results to the public. There were five projects that finished the
• Reduce food waste (both at homes and in supermarkets hackathon. The jury that decided the winners was formed by:
and supply chain) • Louise König, Sustainability Manager at The Co-
• Calculating and communicating environmental impacts operative Group Sweden, COOP
of food products. • Marko Turpeinen , Director, EIT ICT Labs Finland
A main value of a hackathon is the focus on developing, and in • Patricia Lago, Associate professor in software,
most cases in coding. In this hackathon we wanted to broaden services and sustanability, VU University Amsterdam
participation and have also space for more design prototypes,
without losing the focus on creating prototypes and going • Maja Brisvall. Manager, Stockholm Resilience Centre
beyond discussing ideas. Four types of results were suggested:
IV. THE RESULTS The prototype was created by: Sotiris Salloumis, Gaye
There were five final projects that were presented in the Georgia, Johan Zetterquist, Jacky Bourgeois, Sophie Uesson,
John Chang.
Hackathon:
C. Urban Fruit Initiative App
A. Eat Exchange
A web interface for urban fruit initiative, an existing project
The first winner was Eat Exchange, a mobile application which connects homeowners with apple trees with pickers
which allows a local community to share food that would have willing to pick apples, and produces apple juice which then
been wasted. The application idea is to enable individuals to gets distributed between the different stakeholders.
advertise the food that they wouldn’t be able to consume. Then
the supply of spare food would be collected by the members of
the community who would otherwise need to buy it.
Fig 5. Screenshot of Urban Fruit Initiative.
Fig 3. Screenshot of Eat Exchange. The prototype provides an easier way to register and broker
the connection between the two groups, allowing the
The prototype was a combination of mobile app mockup registration of new tree owners and fruit pickers and providing
and a live test using jQuery, HTML and CSS. Created by: a map interface.
Christopher Weeks,Daniel Schien, Pernilla Hagbert, Friedrich
Chasin, Ole Schultz, Tipa Stefan,Theodorou Sophy-
Emmanouela.
B. Last Minute Food
The second winner is a prototype application that proposes
gathering information from COOP supermarkets about the food
that is about to expire and allows the users to explore recipes
based on those ingredients and facilitates the purchase in the
store.
Fig 6. Screenshot of the map interface.
The prototype is open source and made using Firebase,
Bootstrap, jQuery and Google Maps API. Made by: Richard
Blume, Mrhetab Kidane, Andrew Kobylin.
D. Cosecha
Made by the author and outside of competition, Cosecha is
a planning tool to calculate the amount of different crops to
grow in a given field connected to yield and revenue. The idea
is to be able to calculate the need for seed purchases (row-
Fig 4. Screenshot of Last Minute Food. meter) based on production goals (kilograms of produce and
earning)
The mockup mobile application presented different
functionality, including a way to navigate the store using voice.
The prototype was made using jQuery and HTML by: Jorge Exchange explored how mobile technology could connect the
Zapico local community to share resources that would otherwise be
wasted; Last Minute Food explored how supermarkets could
market food that is close to expiration data and in risk of being
thrown away; Urban Fruit Initiative looked at how IT can
empower local initiative that connect people with extra fruit
with pickers so the fruit does not go to waste. This focus in
food waste is in line with the existing projects in the
sustainable HCI community presented before, and maybe a
natural low-hanging fruit for increasing sustainability of the
food system.
One intention when planning this event was to broaden
participation to better include skills outside programming and
developing [10]. This was successful as the event attracted a
broad range of participants, and the teams had mostly a balance
between technical competence and design competence. There
was many of interesting conversations and brainstorming and
good team dynamics.
Fig 7. Screenshot of Cosecha.
!
E. Eat Seasonably
A web prototype application which try to tackle the the gap
in consumer awareness by recommending recipes based on
seasonality.
Fig 9. A team discussing during the event.
On the other hand, the results were all mobile applications
or website, which has been the standard also in the rest of the
Fig 8. Screenshot of SSH team. previous hackathons. In this hackathon we tried to explicitly
open up for other contributions such as data journalism,
Made by: Sevag Balkorkian, Samuel Chinenyeze, Haftom tangible design prototypes and hardware-based hacks. It can be
Tesfay argued that only “allowing” these type of contributions is not
enough. Web and mobile prototypes are easier to work at a
V. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION hackathon scale, as there are many off-the-shelve solutions to
facilitate development, allowing faster creation of working
The ICT4S Green Hackathon explored the use of ICT for
prototypes. For promoting other type of results such as physical
sustainable food consumption and production. Participants
design prototypes or hardware tests, a more proactive approach
spent eight hours developing prototypes and bringing ideas
should be taken, facilitating workshop materials and
forward into more concrete form. This short deadline with a
components from the organisation side, to provide affordances
limited, but uninterrupted, amount of time is instrumental in
and but also to inspire.
the productivity of the hackathons. The quality of the
prototypes produced in hackathons can be considered quite The use of ICT for promoting sustainability in food
high for this short amount of time, as the results above show, production and consumption can be an interesting topic for
even in this event where the time was much shorter than in research for ICT4S. This topic has not been as widely explored
previous hackathons. as other areas such as electricity and energy consumption.
Hackathons events can be a good way of generating and testing
A main theme that emerged from the hackathon was food
ideas, as it can be seen from the presented event, creating
waste. In the keynote it was mentioned that a third or more of
prototypes as proof of concepts that could be developed further
the food produced worldwide ends up as waste [18], this
as applications or in research projects after the hackathons.
challenge was taken up by the participants and three of the five
contributions focused on how to reduce food waste. Eat !
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 13. Blevis, E. and Morse, S. C. 2009. SUSTAINABLY OURS Food, dude.
interactions 16, 2, 58-62.
Thanks to Christine Ambell for the help in organising and 14. Hirsch, T. Sengers, P. Blevis, E. Beck, R and Parikh, T. 2010. Making
running the event, Louise König at COOP for her support, food, producing sustainability. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human
Hannes Ebner cofounder of the Green Hacktahon initiative, Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM, New York, NY,
and the rest of colleagues at KTH that were involved in the USA, 3147-3150. DOI=10.1145/1753846.1753939
process. Thanks also to the members of the jury and specially 15. Vermeir, I., and Verbeke, W. 2006. Sustainable food consumption:
thanks to all the participants of the Green Hackathon who Exploring the consumer “attitude -- behavioral intention” gap. J.
worked hard during the event. Agricult. Environ. Ethics 19(2), 169-194.
16. Clear, A. and Friday, A. 2012. Designing a Food 'Qualculator'. DIS 2012
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