Topic 1: Domestic food practices for enhancing sustainable and healthy diets
We offer long-standing research experience from the field of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), combined with close, trust-based collaboration with grassroots organisations that rescue, redistribute, and share food at the community level.
Our interest in Topic 1 centers on understanding and strengthening the connection between household food practices and community-based food infrastructures, such as food-sharing initiatives, redistribution networks, and mutual-aid settings. From an HCI perspective, we study how technologies, rules, and informal coordination practices mediate participation and shape norms of fairness and contribution.
We contribute empirical and analytical expertise on how dietary practices are embedded in socio-technical arrangements, including how households interact with community food initiatives, how food-sharing practices affect everyday consumption and food waste, and how barriers such as stigma, unequal participation, or conflicting values emerge.
We are particularly interested in projects that move beyond individual behaviour change and instead approach sustainable diets as a relational and collective practice, situated at the intersection of households, communities, and local governance, and supported by carefully aligned digital infrastructures.
University of Siegen, Chair of Business Informatics and New Media
Research Methods: Our research group's research methods are based on participatory and practice-oriented approaches that focus on the active involvement of communities. Our qualitative research approach focuses specifically on the practical actions, needs, and interests of people in order to design (digital) environments that can promote and support economic, ecological, and social relationships. Drawing on the tradition of socio-informatics, for example, in areas such as “consumer informatics,” “IT for an aging society,” “IT to support skilled work,” and “IT for the decarbonization of production and consumption”, we strive to comprehensively support and further develop the respective practices.
