Devotional gardening tools

  • Authors:
  • Tom Jenkins

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

  • Venue:
  • CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Gardening as an activity is devotional, built on the idea that through practice and effort, particular results can be obtained. Devotion is performative, taking time, skill, and repetition to get the results that you want. Human-scale farming depends on the labor of people to get things done, relying on hand tools and particular kinesthetic actions to change the earth in a plot. Digital media technologies afford the creation of tools that can materialize rhetoric, creating alternate functionality emphasizing issues of practice through use. Creating gardening implements that build on the repetitive physical nature of gardening work allows handwork to become something broader: representative of, more reflexive and meditative technological practice. \