Farmsight - Strategic Foresight
My Role: Interaction design, Research, Content Design
Duration: January 2025 - May 2025
Group Project: 3 members
Project Overview
The Problem
What does the future of food in the United States look like 5, 10, and 15 years from now?
The Solution
Farmsight is the result of a strategic foresight project, which was designed for farming communities to share resources, starting with drones, to monitor crop health and yield. Expanding features in the future to include other services.
The Goal
Using various foresight strategies, create a vision of the future for the future of food in the United States.
Starting the Design
Understanding Food System Resilience
My group began the design process with research around the impact of climate change on agriculture, what the state of urban farming looks like, and what impact water scarcity has on farming. We discovered underinvestment in the area of smart farming and usability.
Early Questions
- How might we make the initial cost of smart farming low?
- How might we lower the farmer’s technical mental barrier?
- How might we reduce water usage significantly with smartfarming?
Research Goals
-What kind of farming systems can help save water?
- What types of smart farming systems are there?
-What is the possible change in the future in this domain?
Interview Insights
1.Manual Monitoring Methods
Reliance on labor-intensive techniques like vegetation and soil sampling often requires costly expert support.
2. Delayed Feedback Loops
Crops show rapid change, but soil health takes years to show change. Resulting in slow decision-making.
3. Monitoring Data Sources
Data is fragmented and scattered across tools. It makes monitoring time-consuming and dependent on specialist knowledge.
5. Low Technology Adoption
Roughly 90% of farmers avoid advanced monitoring technologies. Their limited knowledge and distrust of digital systems and data tools are typically why they don’t use them.
4. Intuition and observation
Many farmers still rely on firsthand field observation out of habit and intuition.
6. Poor Data Infrastructure & Investment
A lack of integration, minimal investment in ag-tech, and market dominance by large players hinder innovation and accessibility.
Incorporating Insights
Decision Making Based on Real-Time Data
Deliver timely and actionable insights from drones to help farmers make faster data-driven choices.
Real Time Monitoring
Automated drone systems equipped with sensors reduce manual labor and provide immediate field data
Consolidation of Fragmented Data Sets
Build a centralized platform that brings together different data sets and historical observations into one.
Strategic Foresight
Horizon Mapping
My team created a horizon map for the solutions that we came up with. During this, we thought of what is plausible, what is preferable, and what to avoid.
Business Model Canvas
We created a business model canvas to outline, define, and visually communicate the Farmsight business structure.
The Only Statement
Our drone sharing platform is the only platform that allows small and medium-sized farms to monitor soil quality and share drone technology efficiently, so that farms can operate at lower costs.
Final Design
Impact:
Food Donation & Matching System: Automatically donate leftover produce to food banks, school cafeterias, and non-profit organizations
Crop Share Marketplace: An online market where you can sell or exchange leftover agricultural products
Environmental: Farmsight uses drones to reduce water, fertilizer, and land use, supporting sustainability in water-scarce western U.S. farms.
Consumers: The savings farmers gain will be passed on to consumers, resulting in lower prices and greater product availability in stores and farmers’ markets.
Farmers: Farmers and farmworkers will be most impacted. Better data gives farmers more
Going Forward
Next Steps
Moving forward, Farmsight will move out of a beta testing phase and into general adoption. As service for the drone sharing platform expands, so too would the offering of Farmsight. Potential future products might include sensors that connect with the drones to bring more real-time updates to farmers and other users of the platform.