Chapter 30

Designs for Foraging: Fruit Are Heavy, 2015–16

Carl Disalvo, Tom Jenkins, Jong Won (Karl) Kim, Catherine Meschia, and Craig Durkin

Design for Foraging explores the appropriation of precision technologies for ad-hoc urban agricultures. Fruit Are Heavy is a custom-designed, low-fidelity sensing platform to infer the ripeness of fruit in trees by monitoring the relative droop of branches as the fruit matures. The project uses research-through-design to speculate on diverse economies and propose alternative configurations of so-called smart cities.