Creating a suburban food market

The aim of the Rewilding Melbourne project was to introduce methods of agriculture and sustainable food within urban/inner city locations. Rewilding Melbourne attempts to shift perspective on the reliance on mass-produced foods and promote sharing of produce amongst each other and eventually our natural wildlife.

Forage is a food-sharing app whereby goods are given out of goodwill or a negotiated trade for homegrown produce or homemade foods like jam, pesto, baked goods etc. Anyone can have access to the app provided they have a verified login where they can search for goods in their local neighbourhood or on the go. There are three main pages, forage, swap and grow, each with individualised content relevant to how the user chooses to use the app. If they are a grower, they can upload their crops and their availability is categorised by ‘ripe, ‘limited’ or ‘out of season'. Each listing provides an opportunity for members to share a bit about themselves and their produce (recipe ideas, how much extra they have etc). Other members looking for produce can then place a request and discuss with the grower how much they want to collect from them. Alternatively, members can use the ‘forage’ home page as a scavenger hunt and create a live grocery list that will find the closest location in their locality for pick up.

The idea of Forage is to use it at a local distance, encouraging people to either walk or ride their bikes around the neighbourhood. Once their goods are selected, they can choose their method of pick up (either walk, ride, drive) and create their pathway. When members create this pathway, growers/traders will be notified by text message if they are logged into the app.

This project was developed as part of the TAXA Lab Studio directed by Liam Fennessy and Scott Mitchell at RMIT University.

Process