The document summarizes the process undertaken by a design team to develop a soil health application called SmartSoil for community supported agriculture (CSA) farmers in the suburban Northeast. The team conducted user research including interviews with farmers to understand their needs and motivations. They developed personas and identified key areas of opportunity. They then generated and evaluated initial product ideas through co-design sessions with farmers, selecting SmartSoil as the most promising concept. The team further refined SmartSoil by designing interfaces and interactions focused on critical values like autonomy, and incorporating feedback from soil scientists. They created prototypes, models, and documentation to demonstrate how the application could help CSA farmers visualize and engage with soil health data.

1. CSA Farmers of the Suburban
Northeast
David Hines, Ry Horsey, Steph Northway, and Derek Redfern
Studio 2 Table 2 – UOCD Spring 2013
1

2. The Product: SmartSoil
An application measuring
soil health that allows
farmers to visualize and
engage with their soil

3. The first user interaction
began the process of
confirming and correcting
our assumptions about
farmers

4. At first we labored to understanding and
define themes we noticed in our interactions

5. To improve efficiency,
we structured our
interaction and
abstraction processes

6. Macrostructures allow our user portraits to begin to
do work for us. Here, we identified two key
themes used as axes: Time and Romanticism

7. Our fourth user articulated many of the
complexities and nuances in the CSA
community. This was a watershed moment

8. Word-Mood card synthesis questioned our assumption
that all farmers are life-long learners. Could farmer's
needs be in opposition to their values?

9. Continuums and
graphs enabled
us to identify
unique aspects
of our users

10. Our 3 personas
integrate guided by
our motivational
framework:
Autonomy
Ecology
Community

11. Our personas
represented differing
paths to farming
and
levels of autonomy

13. Our initial Area of
Opportunities were
entirely linear, failed
to represent our
users, and didn’t
interact with our
underlying framework

14. AofO ‘s mapped
BEFORE use of
the motivational
framework
(salmon)
AofO ‘s mapped
AFTER use of the
motivational
framework
(cyan)
Mapping areas of opportunity on our primary
motivational framework of autonomy,
ecology, and community provided us with a
way to consider many facets of farmer’s lives

15. We immediately
generated a few
ideas to allow us
to co-design
while generating
ideas

16. Through co-designing our initial ideas, such as
the community-shared-bootstrap solutions 3-
D printer, and got very efficient feedback as to
what worked, and what didn’t

17. Drawing the CSA
community allowed
us to come to grips
with the potential
scope for ideas

18. Abstracting the
planning process
allowed us to
understand and
rethink it with our
users in mind

19. A thumbs up
thumbs down
metric was used
to quickly
narrow in on our
more interesting
ideas

20. Inventory Merge,
where farmers
further share risk
of CSA, BioDome,
a translucent
building that would
allow farmers to
grow food in urban
environments, and
SmartSoil, an app
for farmers to
visualize their soil
health made up our
final three ideas

21. After co-designing
with the a farming
soil scientist, we
began to see the
potential of
SmartSoil. We
identified key
soil health
metrics such as
Nitrogen,
Phosphorus,
Potassium,
Moisture, Depth,
and Temperature

22. After narrowing
down our ideas,
we select
SmartSoil as the
most compelling &
feasible product
for our suburban
CSA user group
Although Biodome
was Bolder, it didn’t
support the values of
CSA Farmers

23. On a final co-design,
we identified the
opportunity of the
planning
functionality in
SmartSoil

24. Examining Soil reports
currently used by
farmers inspired new
usability in the
SmartSoil app

25. Creating a Broad
Interaction Map
allowed us to get a
feel for the breath
and depth of our
product, and what
needed
development the
most

26. Creating a Requirements
table in parallel allowed
us to quickly specify
important yet ancillary
features

27. Creating the critical
interfaces allowed us
to focus on the
heart of the
product

28. We then had time to
design for critical
values like variable
autonomy in our
interfaces

29. A scale model of the
sensor let us quickly
understand the
interaction and
technology pitfalls.
We redesigned the
product to include
nanowire transistors
on the exterior of the
seed, feasible in
ten years

30. A draft product
poster helps us
better
understand and
communicate
the paradigms
shifted

31. Thansk you