Our new FOOD synthesis project

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I wrote a blog post in early September about a (small) research grant application we handed in to The Swedish Council for Sustainable Development [Formas] with the facile name "A systematic review of the scientific literature on digital interventions for more sustainable food consumption behaviours". The internal code name for the project is just "FOOD" and the applicants were (besides me): Björn Hedin (project leader), Elina Eriksson and Cecilia Katzeff.

We got the money and will spend 20% of our time this year (2018) working on this literature review/synthesis (Björn will as project leader spend 30%) and we will probably work with the "Hoffice" methodology during the spring (once a week around my kitchen table). We have kicked off the project with meetings where we plan the project as well as meetings with each of our three project partners:
- The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdverket) - Jan 24 meeting
- The Swedish Consumer Agency's council for sustainable consumption (Konsumentverket) - Feb 1 meeting in Karlstad
- The Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) - Feb 7 meeting

From our application:

"these agencies will be directly involved in synthesizing existing knowledge in the area of digital interventions for shaping sustainable consumption patterns [...] In this way results will be communicated directly to stakeholders,who in turn may guide us concerning the value of results and aspects of their applicability. These agencies will, thus, act as a reference group during the project. The project will also, if granted the money, contact other potential stakeholders to widen the reference group and support better communication of the project results. [...]  Finally, we will ask our project partners and experts in the field if they are aware of relevant studies not yet found in our review."

I have been to all these meetings and me and Björn also attended a meeting with a librarian at KTH's library who is specialized in doing systematic reviews and who gave us good advice on how to do that. We haven't really gotten down and dirty and started to work with our actual "algorithm" - that's on hold for the moment as we are (actually) busy writing two new Formas applications right now.

But I guess we will start working "for real" in March and I have already taken the opportunity to print a large number of articles (40-50 or so) about food that has been written within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and related areas. I have also read a few of them and will continue to read articles from this collection two weeks from now (when I'm back in Sweden).

I will get back when we have more to report, perhaps sometimes before the summer (?)!