Making the Invisible Visible: Design Activism and Emergency Food in Hausmannsgate

In times of crisis, access to food cannot always be taken for granted. While emergency preparedness often focuses on storing food, another resource is already growing around us: edible wild plants. These plants can provide food directly and may also be preserved and stored for later use. Yet they are rarely recognised as food, even when they grow in the very places where we live and move every day. Design activism can make these overlooked resources visible.
This potential is explored through a design intervention in a small 60 × 60 cm patch of vegetation situated in the middle of a busy road junction in Oslo. Despite its modest size and seemingly ordinary appearance, the patch contains five edible wild species: fat hen, pineappleweed, dandelion, knotgrass, and broadleaf plantain.
Each plant has potential as an emergency food resource, as well as culinary and practical uses. Dandelion has edible leaves, flowers, and roots. Broadleaf plantain has edible leaves and flower stalks and can also be used in wound care. Fat hen is a nutrient-rich leafy plant whose young leaves can be cooked much like spinach. Pineappleweed, with its aromatic flowers, can be used for tea and flavouring. Knotgrass has edible young shoots and leaves. Its small seeds can be eaten whole or ground into flour and used like buckwheat. These qualities are important not only because they make the plants useful, but because they reveal a resource that is already present and largely unnoticed.

Talk Nature Artistic Research uses design activism to draw attention to these overlooked plants and to the possibility of finding edible resources within the urban landscape. Rather than simply presenting information, the intervention marks and highlights the plants themselves, transforming an unnoticed patch of vegetation into a site of curiosity and reflection. The action asks a simple but important question: What resources are already around us that we have stopped seeing?
The response from passers-by became part of the work. Some citizens stopped, photographed the plants, and wanted to learn more about what they were and how they could be used. Others continued on their way, but nevertheless noticed that something had been deliberately marked in the landscape. Through this quiet form of activism, ordinary urban vegetation became a point of encounter between nature, emergency preparedness and public awareness.
The project explores not only edible wild plants as potential emergency resources, but also the role of knowledge and attention in building resilience. In a world characterised by increasing uncertainty and interdependence, preparedness may begin with something as simple as learning to recognise what grows beneath our feet.