Planting Seeds - Designing futures in farming

Agriculture is an old industry that is - like everything else - changing quickly. AI and other new technologies are transforming the industry in formerly unprecedented ways. One emerging trend is an increasing focus on high-value crops, like cannabis. With it's progressing global legalization, the cannabis industry is giving rise to a new generation of farmers: one that needs to make real-time decisions to keep the main user: the plant, healthy— or risk hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss. As such, designing software for this industry means building interfaces between growers and plants that enable deep understanding through an actionable presentation of environmental and biological data.

In my talk I want to draw upon my experience of designing software for this industry to highlight important lessons emerging from this project: In specific, I will address three aspects, Designing for Organisms, Actionable Data and Meaningful Decision-making, that can also be applied to designing for other industries as we move into designing systems and service experiences that will revolve around other living users, such as plants.

Furthermore, I want to use the context of my talk to invite the audience to reframe the notion of the user as a system of actors— which may include non-human counterparts. Necessary to push design itself to be more resilient.