Designing for food system transformation: Navigating cultural complexity in cross-regional platform design

This paper examines the design of a digital platform supporting sustainable food transformation across six European regional Hubs. Through multi-phase participatory evaluation involving contextual inquiry across culturally diverse contexts, responsive redesign, and formal usability testing, we identify a fundamental tension between technical standardization and cultural adaptation. While formal metrics demonstrated strong usability and aesthetic appeal of our platform design, Hub-based evaluation revealed that participants' requests for regional adaptation such as representing traditional production methods, biodiversity, and place-specific sustainability logics challenged fundamental platform assumptions about capturing food knowledge in standardized structures. We articulate emergent design principles including minimizing barriers while maintaining community identity, prioritizing integration over substitution, and facilitating knowledge circulation rather than data collection. Our findings suggest that meaningful transformation requires reconceptualizing platforms as distributed infrastructures that enable local adaptation while maintaining cross-regional knowledge exchange.