A Fruitful Collaboration
Posted March 11, 2015
Foraging activist and Tech alumnus Craig Durkin, MSE 06, MS MSE 07, has teamed up with Associate Professor Carl DiSalvo to make sure the bounty of Atlanta’s neglected fruit trees doesn’t wind up wasted.
Craig Durkin wouldn’t call himself a professional forager—it’s a vocation rather than an occupation. However, he has been an instrumental force in building a foraging movement in Atlanta. Through Concrete Jungle, a nonprofit he co-founded in 2009, Durkin and hundreds of volunteers have picked and donated more than 21,000 pounds of unwanted apples, berries and other fruits to food banks and homeless shelters across the city.
His interest in foraging started five years earlier, beginning shortly after he stepped onto the Georgia Tech campus in 2004. “I couldn’t help but notice there were tons of apple trees across Atlanta, and many of them on public land were going unpicked,” Durkin says. “So a few of us [students] starting picking apples. We bought some chest freezers off Craigslist and stored them up and threw a big party at the end of the semester. We even made cider.”
Every year, the foraging haul got bigger. And Durkin got more and more swept up by the underlying importance of his effort. “My generation is keenly concerned about food waste, as well as the need to produce food locally,” he says. “And we have a certain skepticism about processed, industrial food.”
Durkin kept picking apples with his Tech friends even after completing his master’s degree in materials science and engineering and embarking on a career in nanotechnology. “In 2008, a bumper crop of apples produced way more than we could store or needed,” he says. “That’s when I knew it was time to do something more—to donate the apples to the hungry and homeless.”
With the help of fellow forager Aubrey Daniels, he founded Concrete Jungle the next year. “Our scope immediately grew larger, and we started ranging farther into the city and picking other fruits, too,” Durkin says. In addition to apples, the duo and an intrepid team of volunteers—now numbering about 300 to 400 total—found that pears, muscadines, figs, pomegranates, plums, service berries and other fruits were wasting on the branch and vine.
“We found a lot of fruit not only being wasted on public land around Atlanta, but also in private yards and lots,” he says. “So we started going up and asking permission to forage there, too. In 99 percent of the cases, people didn’t want anything to do with this fruit. They were more than happy for us to come and haul it away.”
Since Concrete Jungle was founded, the group has identified and mapped more than 1,600 fruit trees from which to forage. That’s a lot of trees—and a lot of work.
Unfortunately, as with any kind of volunteer work, life often gets in the way. It became more challenging for Durkin and his core volunteers to keep track of all these trees, monitor when their fruit would ripen and organize outings to pick them.
That’s when Tech Associate Professor Carl DiSalvo got involved. A student of his volunteered with Concrete Jungle and told him about the issues the group was facing.
“The core problem was logistics,” says DiSalvo, who is an assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Media and Communication and has a particular interest in researching community-based food production. “The fruit trees were spread singularly or in small clusters over a wide area of the city—not in a large orchard—and it’s almost impossible to monitor them.”
DiSalvo soon connected with Durkin, and they discussed how Concrete Jungle’s challenges could potentially be solved with technology—and make a great research project. As director of Tech’s Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing (ISTC), DiSalvo is always on the lookout for interesting end-user problems to solve. “Intel is particularly interested in understanding unique consumer user group needs,” he says.
He dedicated his time, students and lab resources to the cause. “And since Craig was a Tech alumnus and familiar with research projects of this scope, it was a perfect fit,” DiSalvo says. “He understood that we were eager to collaborate and help out, but also to research and learn.”
At first, DiSalvo and his team—Caroline Foster, CM 15; Tasmia Alam, CM 15; Karl Kim, CM 16; and Tom Jenkins, PhD DM 16; Catherine Meschia, ID 15;—investigated if hobby-sized drones equipped with cameras could make monitoring easier and less time-intensive. But with the growing public concern about drones and the Federal Aviation Administration cracking down on their commercial use, they discontinued that path.
They’ve since shifted their attention to instrumenting the trees themselves, programming sensors to track the bend of the branches as they get heavier while the fruit ripens. “When the sensor deems the fruit ready, it will send a text message to Concrete Jungle letting them know it’s time to go pick that tree,” DiSalvo says.
DiSalvo and Durkin hope to conduct in-field testing of this approach this summer. “Automating the fruit-tree monitoring would save us a tremendous amount of time,” Durkin says. “And it would make our foraging far more efficient.”
In the meantime, Concrete Jungle created an entirely new source of food by starting its own farm—via donated use of land—that can be planted with fruits and vegetables and harvested year round. Foraging from fruit trees is typically limited to a May-to-October window. “We hope we can continue to provide fresh food to our partners such as the Atlanta Community Food Bank, Crossroads, Hosea Feed the Hungry and more for many years to come,” Durkin says.
Carl F. DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His work explores the intersection of design, art, technology, and politics. His recent design projects have focused on the development of participatory public programs and technology platforms that foster critical engagements with robotics, environmental sensing, and small-scale agriculture.
Article originally featured in the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.
