Keywords

1 Introduction

A community garden is physically a green farmland in an urban environment managed by a non-profit neighborhood community [16]. In community gardens, people self-organize, explore, and use resources around them. They collaboratively overcome problems, maintain and develop the community [18]. There is usually a coordinating committee who are elected by community gardeners. Coordinators lead gardeners to develop community garden policies and guidelines, prepare site infrastructure and promote gardening workshops. Over the past few years, HCI and interaction design communities have explored a range of technologies to support gardeners’ interactions with gardens and tools [18, 19].

However, community gardens are not isolated entities. They connect widely with a larger set of organizations aiming to receive and give help. This situation suggests that designs for community gardens are not merely about the gardens themselves, but also relate to the complex sociotechnical systems they inhabit in. Designing to support community gardens is a situation of DesignX, which is articulated by Norman and Stappers [13]. We argue it is necessary to examine the connections that community gardens have in order to better understand their impacts in a broader view, thereby revealing larger design spaces for promoting urban agriculture. In HCI, however, little research has explored the community connections that support and interact with community gardens. In this paper, we aim at articulating an expanded understanding of a community garden as an end-user to include a diverse connection of stakeholders. Also, this research is driven by the personal interest of the lead author of this paper. The author has been a community gardener over years. Through conducting gardening practices, the author found a community garden was involved in plenty of connections that were hidden from the design researchers’ eyes. We recognize that for design and HCI, we need to reframe the focus of our design from the community garden and gardener to explore beyond to include the diverse stakeholders that connect to a community garden. We believe this work serves as a concrete example of DesignX situation. More significantly, it provides practical steps for designers who are acting to the complexity in the context of community gardens.

In this paper, we articulate how rich the connections of community garden are. In our study, we conducted interviews with five community garden coordinators from three different community gardens. Our findings show that community gardens have built connections with diverse organizations through a variety of ways. Driven by different reasons, a community garden plays different roles in those connections. More interestingly, a community garden’s role is changing with its development: at first, it is a receiver, then it becomes a matcher and at last it grows to be a giver. Based on our findings, we proposed design implications and three scenarios to illustrate the opportunities for design and HCI to support community gardens by going beyond them.

In the following sections, we outline the related work on community gardens as well as communities, non-profit organizations and inter-organizational networks. We then describe our methodology, study, and findings. We conclude with design implications and three scenarios.

2 Related Work

Urban agriculture enables people to have easier access to fresh food in the city [27]. Prior work on urban agricultures largely focuses on “food production”. Community gardening, as an increasingly popular local food producing practice, has drawn researcher interests in HCI and interaction design [10, 18, 19]. For example, Pearce et al. [19] introduced an internet-based application that helps gardeners analyze water amounts in their gardens. Similarly, Angelopoulos et al. [1] developed a system that is able to automatically adjust to environmental conditions and supply specific amount of water for different kinds of plants. Besides focusing on production, Hirsch [12] has a wider view on urban agriculture. He illustrated that urban agriculture practices also include distributing and consuming food in cities. This understanding broadens the focus of urban agriculture as a collective project of diverse organizations, urban systems and resources, and stakeholders from different communities.

Research in HCI often focuses on working together with communities to tackle social problems and create appropriate solutions. Researchers engage different individuals and public organizations (e.g. non-profit organizations, government and companies) in the co-design or co-operative process. For example, in his project called “Neighborhood Network” [7], DiSalvo and his colleagues held a series of participatory design workshops with residents to reflect on the utilization of technologies in their everyday life. In addition, they held co-designed programs with local residents to enable them to design their own products to solve community problems [6]. Le Dantec et al. also pointed out that researchers should start to think about how technologies can “empower people to self-organize” in their communities [14].

To better facilitate civic engagement, HCI and interaction design researchers have also studied relationships of organizations. In the context of organizations and the public, Voida et al. [28] described the role of volunteer coordinators in the bridging of organizations with the public. In their research, they conducted interviews with volunteer coordinators from non-profit organizations about their work. They also summarized how social computing can be a useful tool to support them. Moreover, Voida et al. [29] found that volunteer coordinators created a unique database to manage their everyday information, such as the information of their large number of volunteers and related stakeholders.

Significant research has been conducted on inter-organizational networks [5, 11, 20,21,22]. Nardi et al. [17] addressed the significance of individual’s social network in organizational context. Inter-organizational network is defined as “a collection of organizations that pursue sustained relations of exchange with one another and, at the same time, lack a legitimate organizational authority” [20]. In other literature about inter-organization, Goecks et al. [9] conducted research on collaborative computing in non-profit fundraising. They proposed a model of independent relationships among donors, non-donors, beneficiary and third parties in this practice. Stroll et al. [25] investigated the reasons why some connections between organizations do not exist. They addressed the importance of awareness in the collaboration among organizations. Furthermore, they proposed four factors that hinder the collective action of organizations. The factors are “inside competiveness due to funding pressure”, “asymmetry in ICT access”, “reliance on volunteer workforce” and “hinging on personal motivations and trust among individuals”. Besides the formal collective action, Stroll et al. [25] also did research on informal coordination. They found two features of informal interactions, the first is “common goal as primary basis for interactions”, and the second one is “avoidance of formal commitments”. Their work complements the work of [4, 23] which identified informal interaction as non-hierarchical structure and lack of formally characterized roles in the process.

Our research views community garden not only as an urban agriculture practice, but also as a non-profit grassroots, which has plentiful inter-organizational interactions for reaching its goal of civic engagement. By exploring its connections with corporations, institutions, groups and other organizations, we aim to reveal broader space for researchers and designers to support community gardens and even other non-profit organizations.

3 Study Design and Methodology

In our study of connections of community gardens, we sought to answer the following research questions: What organizations are connected to community gardens? How and why do they connect with each other? What are the roles of community gardens in these connections?

The fieldwork for this research consisted of three community gardens in Vancouver. By visiting the sites, talking with the garden coordinators and reviewing websites, we understood that the goal of Community Garden 1 (G1) is to help meet the increasing demands for urban agriculture and the need to grow communities through community groups. Community Garden 2 (G2) aims to develop an inclusive community and a spirit of openness and cooperation among its members and the promotion of organic gardening methods. Community Garden 3 (G3) belongs to a local business improvement association (BIA). The mission of this BIA is to make the local area a safe and lively community through various creative programs like community gardening. The goal of G3 is to provide local people more opportunities to access green space within a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood.

3.1 Semi-structured Interview

Our interviews are selective. There are many people involved in community gardens, however we chose to interview the coordinators. Our reasoning is that the coordinators of community gardens know about and take responsibility for the connections of the gardens. We recruited 5 coordinators from the previously mentioned three gardens. P1 and P4 are from G1. P1 is the membership coordinator. P4 is the coordinator who is responsible for public relations. P2 is the G2’s coordinator who maintains most of the connections with other organizations. Both P3 and P5 are from G3. P3 is a member of the BIA and responsible for the local resource park process. P5 is the executive director of BIA. We knew P1, P2, and P3 from previous research that we conducted on community gardens. P4 and P5 were suggested by P1 and P3 for this study.

Interviews were between 30 and 60 min. Prior to the interviews, each participant was given an outline with background information about our research and was told that data would remain confidential and anonymous. Participants were asked about the organizations related to the community garden and about the qualities of those connections. Specific questions included: “What organizations are connected to your garden?”, “How and why does your garden connect with that organization? Is it through an individual or another organization?”, “What do you support it or get support?” We also asked participants to tell us how the connection serves the goal of their organizations.

3.2 Garden Site Visits

After each interview, we visited the sites of all three gardens with coordinators. The coordinator showed us different plots in the garden and described the organizations that own the plots. Coordinators gave more details on the organizations during the visit. We took notes and photographs. We were also invited to observe and participate in one of garden’s anniversary party.

3.3 Volunteering in the Anniversary Event (Fig. 1)

We volunteered in and observed an anniversary event for G3. During the event, people from other related organizations came to visit. For example, a small urban homesteading shop facilitated two garden workshops. On site, there was a demonstration of a truck farm. There were also local pocket farmers’ who marketed fresh fruits and vegetables at the event. We talked with people from different organizations and asked questions about why they participated in the event, how they knew the garden, and how they support each other and developed the relationship.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Volunteering in the anniversary event

Full size image

3.4 Data Analysis

We transcribed audio recordings and notes and then performed a thematic analysis on the transcribed data. This involved coding data into themes based on our interpretation of the data. The themes include: (1) types of organizations; (2) paths and reasons for building connections; (3) community garden’s roles in these connection. In the following sections, we describe the main findings from our study.

4 Findings

4.1 Diverse Organizations Get Connected

We found community gardens connect with various kinds of organizations (Fig. 2). Below we present a brief description of the organizations related to each community garden.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Organizations connected to community gardens

Full size image

Business Organizations.

For anonymity reasons, we use O1x to represent the organization related to community garden G1, O2x for G2 and O3x for G3.

In Table 1, we present the business organizations that related to three community gardens. As we can see in the table, there are business groups involved from local level to municipal level. There are also national and international business organizations that are related to community garden with various supporting (we will give more details in the following sections).

Table 1. Business organizations
Full size table

Non-profit Organizations.

Community gardens relate to many non-profit organizations (see Table 2). According to our data, we found gardens to be connected to local neighborhood houses, community centers and other municipal or national levels of non-profit organizations that support community building and their development.

Table 2. Non-profit organizations
Full size table

Government and Financial Organizations.

Community gardens are related to the government because they are situated in the city and follow municipality rules or guidelines. In addition, based on our research, we found that community gardens receive funding from some financial organizations (see Table 3).

Table 3. Government, financial, urban agriculture and other organization
Full size table

Urban Agriculture Organizations.

Community gardens build connection with other gardens and urban agriculture organizations, such as an urban farm or community garden society (see Table 3).

Other Organizations.

We also found that community gardens have connections to local schools, tool libraries, religious organization (e.g. Christian church) and art studios (see Table 3). Not only the types of organizations are diverse, but also the paths or ways gardens take to connect them are various.

4.2 Paths for Building Connections

According to our interviews, we generated three paths community gardens tread to connect to other organizations. The first one is what we called organization-individual(s)-organization. This means community garden establish connections with other organizations through its own member(s). The second type is organization-organization-organization, which we found that community garden could build a new connection with another organization through one organization they already know. The third type of connection is what we labeled as organization-internet-organization. With this type of connection, community gardens search on the Internet to look for the organization that could offer them certain help.

Organization-Individual(s)-Organization.

There are two modes in this type of connection. The first one is two organizations are connected by one person who works for both organizations. This individual becomes a bridge between the garden and the organization.

“Our BIA connected to that school (O39) because we want the students to teach people who are from the neighborhood house (O33) to cook healthier food using cheap and simple vegetables (most vegetables are from G3). By doing this, students from O39 could offer their time and expertise to help the poor people to live a healthier way. We knew O39 through a member of our sustainable committee. This member is also working in O39 and she got this idea.” – P5

The other mode is that a member of a community garden knows a person in another organization. Based on this relation, two organizations are then connected.

“My coworker runs it (O18). They had an event and she asked me whether the garden could be a guest speaker in that event.” – P4

This way of connecting is often vulnerable to the problem that if any of those individuals left that organization, the connection gets lost and the relationship ends. According to our interviews, community gardens have a hard time to rebuild lost connections.

Organization-Organization-Organization.

Organizations can also be an effective bridge to help community garden connect with another organization, which it needs help from. For example, one of our participants told us they became connected to another organization through the introduction of the city government. According to our data, compared with connections built through an individual, we found that a connection through an organization is more stable.

Organization-Internet-Organization.

Another common connection between community gardens and organizations is through the Internet. When community gardeners need help they can’t get from the organizations they are connected with already, they search online to look for organizations that could offer support. Some community gardens also use Twitter in similar ways.

“We find O37 through Internet searching. We found they had technically supported many communities in the past, so we tried to call them and they agreed to help us… Yeah, it is hard to look for an organization that could give us special help we need on the Internet.” – P5

Finding a special support from an unknown organization by searching online is a big challenge for gardeners. Besides, building connection with other organizations is especially difficult before the garden is build.

“Initially we made a conscious effort to develop relationships. It was part of getting approval from the park board. We had the relationships before we built the garden. This is part of what makes the garden a community organization, not just a garden.” – P4

In summary, community gardens make invest substantial effort to access and to reach other groups or institutions. In an ad hoc manner they receive recommendations from other organizations or individuals or they find help from the Internet. These paths are unstable, uncertain or easily fail.

4.3 Reasons for Connection

Community gardens connect with above various organizations for different reasons. In this section, we list three main ones that emerge from our data. Uncovering these invisible rationales helps us clearly categorize the roles that community gardens play in the connection and what community gardens provide to or take from other groups.

Connecting for Community Inclusion.

As we mentioned in the introduction section, there are different kinds of community gardens. A common goal of community gardens is to facilitate community inclusion.

To realize this goal, a popular approach that community gardens use is to include organizations by giving or renting them plots in the garden. Those organizations usually are ones who help and provide housing and job support to vulnerable people (e.g., local community center). The following quote represents the fact that the community garden G2 sets special plots for people from those organizations.

“We want to include vulnerable people that are isolated in our society. So we created our garden to save 10% of our beds to either people who have disability or youth. They are from the program that supports youth refugees of O25 and disabilities of O26.” – P2

Besides plots, community gardens donate parts of their harvest to these organizations, as another way for building a more inclusive community.

Connecting for Getting Assistance.

Community gardens ask assistance from other organizations during their development. This assistance for example includes helping building garden infrastructure and executing events. One of our participants from G3 told us,, in getting help to build the community garden G3, they made connected with a non-profit organization that provides assistance from building professionals.

“It is very technical and a lot of new vocabularies. O37 made a lot of drawings and put them on a piece of paper. They helped us a lot to pass the zoning bylaws.” – P5

Connecting for Peer Support.

Besides connecting for community inclusion and getting assistance, community gardens team up with other community organizations for supporting each other. For example, G1 along with other local community gardens set up an association O12. The following is a peer-supporting instance told by our participant.

“We were able to sign a popular gardener to come to do a workshop for us from California. So we were able to partner with a few other gardening organizations to market the event, like other community gardens market the event to their email lists, and other community organizations that focus on healthy living.” – P1

Connecting Because of Being Administrated.

Most community gardens are built on municipal land. This means the garden must meet municipal policies and land-use codes, as well as accept being administrated in part by city staff. One of our participants from G1 explained the many specific rules to follow since their garden is in a park:

“There are a lot of regulations, you know? You have to be far away from the street. You have to have water available. There are a lot of small guidelines, so sometimes the Parks Board come to the garden once a year just to see if everything is been used correctly, or anything needs to be changed.” – P1

Gardens not only need to follow the city policies, but also local guidelines.

“We contact the elementary school (O111) near us when we are doing a project that might affect them, for example making a bee hive.” – P4

Different from previous reasons driven by which community garden could create flexible, varied and unstable connections with diverse organizations, the connections built because of being supervised are rigid, uniform and stable.

4.4 Three Roles of Community Gardens

As we articulated, community gardens connected to diverse organizations because of different reasons. When we read closer to our data, we found that community gardens play different roles in those connections. In some cases, community gardens contribute to other organizations. There are also connections in which community gardens take advantages of other organizations. And sometimes, they try their best to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting. In this section, we illustrate these roles and present their respective characteristics.

Community Garden as a Giver.

As a giver, based on our data, community gardens offer resources to other groups. The giving is usually plots and harvests from the garden as well as gardening knowledge. For example, in previous sections, we have mentioned that gardens usually contribute gardening beds and part of their food to special non-profit organizations which have vulnerable people, for making them less isolated in the society. There might be more types of resources that community gardens provide to the society, but based on our study, compared to the assistance they receive from other organizations, what community gardens have to offer is very limited.

The limits on these resources impact the garden’s development. As one of our participants said:

“We connect with the library as needed. They have allowed us to use their display case to make a display. We gave them a list of books to purchase, and they took our advice! They let us use their meeting room before we had built the garden. Now, we try not to ask for too much because they usually do things for us, and we can’t do too much in return.” – P4

Community Garden as a Receiver.

In contrast to a garden’s limits as a giver, community gardens receive plentiful and varied support from other organizations. Below, we present four specific advantages community garden receive from other organizations.

Garden Materials.

Community gardens get support of materials especially when they are starting and have to build structures. They need wood, compost and tools. Therefore, a lot of organizations give help on the building day of the garden.

“On the building day, we got wood and wood chips donations from O23. … We also got soil for free for building the plots.” – P2

Labor.

Organizations also send volunteers to community gardens to help them on the building day. Community gardens also get help from gardeners from other gardens.

“O12 is the umbrella organization for all community gardens in Van. They helped us get started.” – P4

“We got a lot of help from O27. They brought many volunteers to help build the garden.” – P2

Technical Expertise.

Building a garden is not easy work. It requires landscape design, architecture and irrigation. Community gardens need technical expertise support to meet these requirements.

Funding.

Community gardens in our study often apply and receive grants for building new facilities or holding events. Usually, in this relationship model, community gardens need to report to the organizations that give grants about how the money is used.

“They gave us $500. We try to keep in touch to tell them how we use their money. For O112 we had to contact them a lot to get the money from the fundraiser. Now we are finished working with them.” – P4

Community Garden as a Matcher.

In some connections, gardens both provide for and recieve support from other organizations. There usually exists an “exchange”, in which community gardens often use their plots, harvests or gardening abilities to “trade” with other groups to obtain what they want. Following is an example that community garden utilize their gardening beds to trade with a local business.

“O32 has technical expertise to take care of the garden and also teach people gardening knowledge. As a for-profit local store, O32 uses the garden to give workshops and let itself known by people. And for us, there are other people take care of the garden rather than ourselves.” – P5

In addition, the “exchange” can be intangible. For example, community gardens publicize each other on social network platforms.

“We’ve stayed in touch with O114 and repost each others’ Facebook posts, random things like that…O18 had an event on “local food” and one of our gardeners gave a speech on permaculture for them. Then they retweet our tweets.” – P4

Above we have discussed diverse types of organizations community gardens connect to, the reasons for connecting to them and community garden’s different roles in these connections. For a clearer understanding of the relationship between the connection reason and community garden’s role, we create a table and make a summary here.

From Table 4, we can find that for receiving support and funding, a garden mainly plays a role of receiver in the connections. When gardens build connections for peer support, they become matchers that exchange or swap resources. Moreover, for making a more inclusive community, community garden aim to or become a giver within the connection. The results we present here seems static, however, both the connections and the roles of gardens are gradually changing during the development of a community garden.

Table 4. Roles in each type of connections
Full size table

Role Transformation of Community Garden.

With the development of the community garden, its connections are strengthened, change to another type or become broken sometimes. We found the roles of community garden in these connections are not always the same or stable. They are fluid.

“Relationships have changed over time - at first it was to get expertise and money, but also symbolic support. Now it’s about peers like O114 and O14, people with whom we can have ongoing relationships.” – P4

We found at the beginning of a community garden, it builds more connections for getting assistance (the role of a receiver). Later, when the community garden becomes more mature, it develops peer-support connections, which consist of new connections and those transferred from old connections that were built on getting assistance. According to the community gardens’ goal of community inclusion, we assume that a potential future step of community garden is to develop more connections to the point a community garden becomes a giver.

Furthermore, through comparisons of these three gardens, we found that G1 is more a “matcher” than G2 and G3 who can be viewed as “receivers”. By exploring their activities, we also found that G1 has more variety of activities than G2 and G3, which makes G1 more involved with the neighborhood and connected to a wider group of stakeholders. To reach the goal of community inclusion, community gardens are gradually transforming their role from a receiver to a matcher, and then to a giver.

5 Design Implications and Discussion

This study has explored diverse connections that community gardens have. During their growth, community gardens invest efforts to establish relations with diverse organizations for different reasons. In this process, they constantly change their role from a receiver to a matcher, and to a giver. By understanding this, how should we, as designers, support community gardens and prompt their role transformation and development? In this section, we outline a range of implications based on our findings.

5.1 Visible and Traceable Resources and Services

As we discussed previously, gardening materials, tools, and technical building professionals are commonly needed by community gardens, especially those newly created. However, it is not always an easy task for gardeners to find the organizations that can give them support. Even if there are some possible organizations recommended by individuals or another organization, it is not certain that they can provide the specific services the gardens need. Therefore, we see the benefits in visualizing the varied resources and services that could be provided to community gardens. Besides making these visible, the assistances should be traceable. Community garden could clearly know where the assistances they have already gotten come from. By this way, community garden can manage the support they receive and make choices of providers in the future. For example, instead of creating a manual database to manage volunteers as described by the participants in Voida’s study [28], they can clearly see where their volunteers come from and easily find and recruit more if needed. Making resources and supports visible and traceable would also be important in the case of the individuals who built the connection and later left the community garden. Moreover, visible and traceable resources and services could also be beneficial to other community groups who are currently at the stage as a “receiver”. For example, an elementary school that is looking for support to build an educational garden in their playground could also take advantage of these visible resources and services.

5.2 Awareness of Both Organizational and Individual Connections

Community gardens receive assistance from other organizations to further develop. During this process, community gardens constantly build abilities and accumulate assets. When they become more mature, they are not only “receivers” who receive help. More significantly, they start to become “matchers” who make transactions with other groups.

With awareness of both organizational and individual connections, community gardens could find more opportunities to exchange or trade resources or knowledge with other organizations. This will be very beneficial to gardens at the “matcher” stage. Technologies developed for knowledge bartering or resource exchange for individuals have become popular nowadays, for example, Shared Earth [24], Zilok [30] and Trade School [26]. People can exchange or swap knowledge and resources in these platforms. However, there is dearth of systems that have been developed for organizations to make transactions, especially for non-profit organizations. Systems could be designed and developed to fill this gap. The issues for organizational transaction we think designers should consider about are how to make the transitions fair, trackable, and exceptions detectable.

In addition, we learned that community gardens donate local food to other organizations, such as local community centers and neighborhood houses. This creates the opportunity to see how urban agriculture impacts is as much about food distribution and consumption as it is about production. It would be beneficial to see where and how the local food is distributed and consumed through the network. Thus, there are design opportunities to track the food over time and geographically. Consistent with Hirsch’s opinion [12], this would be helpful to clarify the “green flow” of urban agriculture enabling researchers to understand the “production-distribution-consumption” cycle better.

5.3 Promote Civic Engagement

A significant goal of community gardens is creating an inclusive community. We envision community garden in the future could serve the society as a “giver” when it evolves to be more mature. As a “giver”, a community garden would be willing to make their resources public and accessible to other groups. They thus get ready to share and offer what they have to new community gardens or other groups to promote their development. This complements Le Dantec’s idea of “empower people to self-organize” [15]. Designers could support this process by helping community gardens that are at the “giver” stage to public their resources and services. Moreover, technologies could be developed to recruit new community groups who can be the receivers of those public resources. Clearly, if this could be realized, the issue of “receiver” community garden is not an issue any more. Therefore, when the system supports community gardens well, it can attract and involve more new organizations. This will create a virtuous cycle. The local food movement could be also promoted in the process.

In conclusion, a community garden can be seen as a seed in our societal environment. It absorbs various nutrients from the earth at the beginning. When it gets stronger, they fit with other species and benefit each other. Bees come to it for making honey and pollination. When it becomes mature, it returns its fruit to the society and nourishes the soil for more new seedlings to grow.

6 Design Scenarios

In this section, we propose three design scenarios to better illustrate how designers can support community gardens of different stages. The scenarios successively feature an online system that support community garden at “receiver”, “matcher” and “giver”.

6.1 Scenario 1

Mike and many of his neighbors received approval from the city to build their community garden at the corner of their neighborhood park. They have wood and soil provided by the City Park Board but they still need tools for people to use on the building day. Mike was introduced to the website “Find Your Local Resources” to find the tools for his group to use. He registered in the system with the address of their garden. By searching the keyword “tool”, the system presents all the nearby organizations with the tools and related services they are providing. Mike was excited and surprised since he never knew there were so many available tools nearby. After comparing the price for lending and the distances to these organizations, Mike finally chose the community public tool library and “Building Home” which is a landscape association that supports landscape maintenance programs. Mike borrowed many building tools from the tool library. He also bought common gardening tools from “Building Home” for the members to use in daily gardening. Mike and his group were happy since their garden was successfully built at a low-cost.

6.2 Scenario 2

Time flies fast. It has been three years since the start of Mike’s community garden. That last year was a good year. The garden harvested an abundance of honey, fruit and vegetables. Gardeners’ faces were full of smiles. However, Mike also received complaints from gardeners that many of their tools were too old to use and some of them were broken. This problem became more serious in the busy harvest season when all members frequently required tools. Mike went back to “Find Your Local Resources” again. Their old friend “Building Home” was still providing tools. Different from last time, Mike talked to “Building Home” not about buying new tools but asking whether they could exchange tools for fresh local honey and vegetables. “Building Home” was interested in this exchange because the business would have a party and they needed vegetables and honey. Both Mike’s community garden and “Building Home” thought it was a good deal. Mike thus negotiated with “Building Home” through the system a fair exchange between the quality of the tools and the amount of honey and vegetables. The system also scheduled the best times for the exchange since the party was not for some time and Building Home wanted fresh produce. Once all the conditions were agreed upon through the system, both were satisfied.

6.3 Scenario 3

Two more years have passed. Mike’s community garden has made numerous transactions with new and old connected organizations by exchanging tangible and intangible resources in the system. Many organizations and individuals in the city have come to know about Mike’s community garden. Instead of looking for resources and help from other organizations in the system, the garden now frequently posts what it offers in the system. It offers gardening knowledge, garden building assistance service, local honey, fresh fruits and vegetables as well as gardening tools that are visible and available in the system for trade and purchase. The garden also wants to provide what they have to newly created community gardens and other groups. On a Sunday, Mike received a new message in the system. Not very far from their neighborhood, Lucy and her team members would build a garden in the school playground. They needed tools and garden building professionals. Mike and his garden members gladly offered help. It was seen as a step in realizing their goal of community inclusion. Mike’s community garden, beautiful and mature, is playing an increasingly important role in promoting civic engagement.

7 Conclusion

By investigating three community gardens in Vancouver to explore their related organizations, this paper has articulated an expanded understanding of a community garden as an end-user to include a diverse connection of stakeholders. Our results show that community gardens have built a variety of connections with diverse organizations during their development process. Based on the findings, we proposed design implications and three design scenarios to illustrate the possibilities that design and HCI can support community gardens during different stages. Admittedly, our study has its limitations. For example, there are many different kinds of community gardens that may have more types of connections in around the world. This research only explored cases of community gardens in Vancouver. The results might be limited by the unique politics and connections of our city related to urban agriculture. However, our work broadens the existing limited focus on community garden practitioners. It reveals a new space that design and HCI could support to promote urban agriculture and civic engagement. By providing small but practical design scenarios as illustrations to support community gardeners who are actively embedded in complex sociotechnical systems, this work responds to DesignX: Acting to Complexity which suggests that “designers cannot stop at the design stage: they must play an active role in implementation, and develop solutions through small, incremental steps to reduce political, social, and cultural disruptions” [13].