To be of use – designing software with progressive food growers in Aotearoa New Zealand

Conventional agricultural systems – how we grow, process, and supply food – contribute to local and global environmental problems. These contributions include damaging soil health, loss of productive soil, waterway pollution, greenhouse gas production, and the distortion of tolerable weather patterns due to climate change. The changing climate in turn makes it more difficult to maintain agricultural systems. The last twenty years has seen the growth of agricultural practices in opposition to the conventional, where the farmers’ intent is to work as part of the ecological system in which they reside, so that both the agriculture and its ecological host may benefit. Alongside progressive developments in agriculture, alternative systems for getting the food to customers have sprouted, including shorter and more local food chains. At the same time there has been growth in digital products and services for agriculture. Most of them are designed and developed to support conventional and often larger agriculture practices, in part because the scale of the addressable market makes it commercially viable for software development companies to do so. However, small progressive farmers share similar complexities as larger operations, and could benefit from digital tools to help them plan, grow, and manage their farming systems, make records to demonstrate their compliance across various standards, as well as analyse their performance to improve their practices. This project explores the systems of small progressive vegetable growers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on a rudimentary understanding of their growing and selling processes, and working directly with three progressive growers, I have designed some early concepts for tablet and phone-based software. This project is also an opportunity to explore how UX design processes might operate in a non-commercial context, with an emphasis on a non-extractive process that is ultimately useful for the people working alongside designers.