2024-06, Bedö, Viktor

Commoning is on the rise as a socio-economic practice advancing the outlook of more just food systems. While smaller commoning operations can predominantly rely on informal arrangements, tracking and monitoring the conditions of the use of resources becomes vital for larger operations. This paper explores the datafication of hunger, pleasure, ingredients, cooking and spoiled food for crafting imaginaries of commoning-based algorithmic food futures. To address not only frictions around datafication but also gainful proposals, the paper mobilizes concepts of ‘unwieldy data’, ‘good enough data’, and ‘minimal feasible datafication’. It uses fiction writing as a method to amalgamate scholarly references in the field of citizen sensing and smart city critique with preliminary learnings from a speculative city-making project into an infrastructural proposal. The text aims to prompt a wider debate about the potentials and pitfalls of algorithmic governance and datafication in infrastructures for the urban-scale distribution of material resources, such as food.

2020, Savic, Selena, Bedö, Viktor, Büsse, Michaela, Martins, Yann Patrick, Miyazaki, Shintaro

This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and explor- ing the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.

2021-03-26, Bedö, Viktor, Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong

Scaling Material Urban Commons is a speculative city-making project investigating automated logistics for commoning material urban commons, such as rescued food. It postulates that some forms of material commons require different forms of beyond-hyperlocal scale commoning. The project critically investigates and prototypes technological and sociotechnical conditions for city-wide commoning of material urban commons, using a predictive-algorithm-based system emulator that orchestrates pickup and drop-off of rescued food in Basel and London. Introducing predictive technology shifts the site of commoning closer towards an algorithm- driven platform, which raises following key questions: What frictions emerge from changing scale in commoning? How to reconcile predictive technologies with local, idiosyncratic food cultures? How to engage in commoning with algorithmic agents in participatory settings? By addressing these questions, the project aims at creating imaginaries of commoning-based smart city alternatives.

2021-03-26, Bedö, Viktor, Miyazaki, Shintaro

It is overwhelming to think there are no alternatives or the system is too big for design to generate impact. Commoning is seen as an alternative socio-technic and technological possibility of sensing and computing power promise some possibilities. Material Commons have logistic aspects, thus distribution and challenge infrastructures and market-based economic models. But we are lacking the means of translating the possibilities of technologies into concrete mechanisms and design principles that carry the values of commoning. This paper suggests the creation of imaginaries in combination with situated playful exploration to contribute the evoking what is on the fringes. It proposes a playful (street and video call) exploration format building on a fictional algorithm drive infrastructure for distributing rescued food and draws preliminary reflections about future uses of this and similar formats in designing alternative worlds.