Drones for Foraging

Drones for Foraging is a research through design project that explores the use of hobbyist drones in support of urban foraging. The underlying motivation for this project is to use design as a means of investigating future practices and to provide the basis for near-term innovation with hobbyist drones. Through this project we are developing use-cases that make strong claims around the current and future uses of drone technologies to aid bottom-up food finding, prototyping software and user interfaces for drone navigation, helping build a broader community of practice around these complex issues, and exploring the use of open-source technologies for image capture and analysis. Our work is intended to provide real-world rationales that move drones beyond being military hardware or simply a technological gizmo. Repurposing automation and monitoring technologies as partners in food-finding proposes a collaboration between the ecological, technical, and social that illustrates one way to generate new food infrastructures.