Innovative design for agriculture in the move towards sustainability: scientific challenges

Abstract

International audienceAgriculture is facing increasing innovation challenges to meet current societal expectations, yet very few design science studies are devoted to it. This paper highlights some of the particularities of the objects, reasoning and organization of design in agriculture that may open fruitful scientific dialogue between design scientists and agricultural scientists. We first provide an overview of the broad range of objects that are designed in agriculture, and point out their specific characteristics with regard to design. We then identify some particular challenges of design activities in agriculture and review how they have been addressed up to now. Finally, we discuss how design challenges and characteristics in agriculture can contribute to current debate in the field of design science. We propose two main lines of inquiry and debate: enhancing the links between design reasoning and organization, and further conceptualizing the status of use situations in design to deal with uncertainties and complexity in design processes. Acknowledgements: We thank our two research divisions at INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural Research) for their support to the research on design in agriculture: the Science for Action and Development (SAD) division and the Environment & Agronomy (EA) division. This work was realized on the initiative of the newly born INRA institute for design in agrifood systems. We thank Liz Libbrecht for language editing the English version of this paper, and are deeply grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments that were of great help for improving this article

Perceptions, Experiences, and Priorities Supporting Agroecosystem Management Decisions Differ among Agricultural Producers, Consultants, and Researchers

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Evaluation of the Operationalisation of the TATA-BOX Process

“…Many researchers today argue that the issues facing French agriculture call for an in-depth redesign of farming systems and territories (Martin et al 2012;Meynard et al 2012Meynard et al , 2017Duru et al 2015;Prost et al 2017). This would require the development of capabilities around design in the agricultural world, from both a methodological and a theoretical point of view.…”

Supporting farmers’ management of change towards agroecological practices by focusing on their work: a contribution of ergonomics

“…Farmers have to design a new agricultural work system based on agroecological practices, taking into account the changing characteristics of their work. These include: the nature and diversity of constraints faced by farmers; the "evolving and uncertain" nature of agricultural work situations; the influence of the network of actors "revolving" around farms; and the particularities of this context of agroecological transition (Williams, 2011;Duru et al, 2014;Prost et al, 2017). In this sense, it seems necessary to develop farmers' design activity to help them design new agricultural work systems based on agroecological practices.…”

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