Overview

This international digital civics exchange brought together students, researchers, and community partners to investigate societal challenges.
My team focused on understanding why small-scale English farmers resist new agricultural technologies and how provocative design methods could surface deeper insights.

Through rapid research, ideation, and prototyping, we created a provotype intended to challenge farmer perceptions and help our sponsors collect richer qualitative data.

 

Problem

Interview transcripts from farmers across Newcastle, Leeds, and Manchester revealed recurring issues:
• Deep skepticism toward digital tools
• Strong preference for traditional, manual farming practices
• Limited trust in unfamiliar technologies
• Resistance tied to identity, autonomy, and heritage

Existing design approaches were insufficient. A new method was needed to provoke reactions and uncover underlying attitudes.

 

My Role

I contributed to:
• Reviewing and synthesizing interview transcripts
• Identifying themes related to farmer values, fears, and workflows
• Participating in collaborative brainstorming with international teammates
• Generating concepts and sketching ideas for the provotype
• Helping develop the narrative and presentation for final handoff

 

Key Insights

• Resistance to technology is not based on ability but identity and tradition
• Farmers value independence and personal knowledge over automated systems
• Tools that appear to replace intuition or embodied skill generate distrust
• Provocative, fictional artifacts can reveal deeper emotional and cultural responses

 

Solution

We created a provotype called the Landlog Apron: a fictional farming tool designed to intentionally provoke responses from farmers.

Concept:
A farmer embroiders reactive “threads” onto an apron, each linked to a location on their land. Installed field associators feed environmental data (temperature, moisture, etc.) to the threads, which visibly and tactilely change.

Purpose:
Not to solve a practical problem, but to challenge farmers’ assumptions, spark conversation, and help researchers surface values, beliefs, and boundaries around farm-tech adoption.

 

Impact

This approach helped sponsors gain:
• A new lens for exploring farmer identity and autonomy
• A tool for eliciting candid reactions and deeper emotional responses
• A provocation they can deploy in future field studies to gather richer insights

The project also demonstrated how speculative design can reveal motivations that traditional research methods miss.

 

Next Steps

• Build a full-scale version of the provotype for field use
• Develop more detailed world-building materials to support immersion
• Conduct concept testing with farmers to analyze themes, tensions, and opportunities

 

Documentation

• Research Summary & Themes
• Provotype Concept + Narrative
• Storyboard: “Earl and the Landlog Apron”
• Presentation Materials​​​​