Design for Discovery: Helping Australian Farmers Explore their Options in a Government Sustainability Program Through User Centred Design

Abstract

With growing recognition that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced, there exists exciting design challenges to support industries’ efforts to meet sustainability targets. In this paper, we report on a User Centered Design (UCD) approach for addressing the need to combat rising emissions levels with a focus on agriculture, both relatively new areas for UCD work. We report on our team’s experience using the approach in context of trying to support farmers’ discovery and exploration of options in Australia’s national carbon scheme. In evaluation of a digital prototype, seven farmers and farm business advisors provided feedback on the tool’s usability and on whether insights provided by the tool assisted their decision to participate in the government scheme. Our experiences demonstrate how UCD helps determine the prototype’s usability and usefulness, as well as inform us about contextual issues that make a concerted response of reducing emissions complex. The generalizability of this research and future work is discussed.