Designing with Farmers. A multi-actor framework to include Human-Centred Design in the digitization of farming services and collaboration practices

Agricultural innovation, such as new software and hardware, have often been created through a development lifecycle that often ignores users’ values, needs and concerns. Advisory services (or extension services) play a key role in promoting agricultural development and innovation and facilitate between involved actors. Traditional "linear models" of innovation have increasingly been replaced by more systemic approaches, including researchers, extension services, educators, and end-users - as promoted in the Mutli Actor Approach (MAA) by the EIP-Agri. Our work follows a Human-Centred Design (HCD) approach. HCD can be described as a methodology where designers follow a holistic approach to focus on users’ human needs in order to humanize the innovation process. We use the DEMETER Stakeholder Open Collaboration Space (SOCS) as an illustrative case study to demonstrate how using a Human-Centred Design (HCD) approach results in a more intuitive and user-friendly solution and demonstrates how HCD, as a MAA framework, can be used by advisory services to improve collaboration and aid in the digitization of agricultural practices. We illustrate methods on how agricultural advisors can include farmers in innovation processes from the very beginning, thus strengthening their position in agricultural innovation.