CHS: Small: The Farm as Lab: Information Technology Innovation in Computational Agriculture

这项研究整合了两个目标：调查，记录和传播有关替代农业创新的知识，以人为本的计算社区，并支持替代农业创新实践，使用系统设计方法开发新技术，建立和扩展已经发生的各种实验农场。 为了应对人口增长、粮食需求增长、饮食变化和气候变化，近年来在农业中使用信息通信技术的情况激增。实验农场继承了许多有助于定义创客运动的潜在社会技术结构，但它们尚未得到理解或支持。这些结构包括越来越强大的终端用户技术，知识渊博和充满激情的从业者网络，与计算机科学相关的调查目标，以及对他们社区的高效益。该项目的一个主要阶段将进行民族志实地考察，依赖于参与者观察，文化和技术文物分析，以及在两个研究地点进行的半结构化访谈。其中一个将研究台湾的替代性IT农业实践，以揭示农民如何在日常基础上进行实验性创新。 另一个项目将侧重于印第安纳州的农业实验，以了解和记录农民、政策制定者和技术人员如何利用技术来应对粮食生产和可持续性方面的关键挑战，以及以农业技术为导向的举措如何培养未来的高科技、高技能农民。 研究的另一个阶段将结合联合收割机的文件，话语和口述历史分析的政策材料，从两个现场的政府，以确定对齐和错位，要么促进或削弱旨在支持农业创新的努力。 民族志工作、口述历史和话语分析将成为共同设计讲习班的投入，这些讲习班将遵循参与性设计的原则。 他们将测试在民族志活动中确定的有前途的农业技术突破，挑战和策略，并将采取“设计冲刺”的形式，这是一个高度结构化的过程，广泛用于美国科技行业，用于回答利益相关者的关键问题，其特点是绘制问题地形，识别风险和机遇，概念生成，原型设计，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

This research integrates two goals: to survey, document, and disseminate knowledge about innovation in alternative agriculture to the human-centered computing community, and to support alternative-agricultural innovation practices using system design approaches to develop novel technologies that build on and extend what is already happening on a diversity of experimental farms. In response to population increases, growing food demand, changing diets, and climate change, recent years have seen a surge in the use of information communication technologies in agriculture. Experimental farms carry forward many of the same underlying sociotechnical structures that helped to define the maker movement, but as yet they are not yet understood or supported. These structures include increasingly powerful end-user technologies, networks of knowledgeable and passionate practitioners, inquiry objectives relevant to computer science, and high benefit for their communities.A major phase of the project will conduct ethnographic fieldwork that relies on a combination of participant observation, analysis of cultural and technological artifacts, and semi-structured interviews conducted within each of two research sites. One will examine alternative, IT-enabled farming practices in Taiwan to reveal how farmers experimentally innovate on a day-to-day basis. The other will focus on agricultural experiments in Indiana to understand and document how farmers, policymakers, and technologists use technology to address critical challenges in food production and sustainability and how agriculture-technology-oriented initiatives cultivate high-tech, high-skilled farmers of the future. Another phase of the research will combine documentary, discourse, and oral history analysis of policy materials from governments of both field sites to identify alignments and misalignments that either facilitate or undercut efforts intended to support agricultural innovation. The ethnographic work, oral histories and discourse analyses will be inputs into co-design workshops that will be informed by principles of participatory design. They will test promising agriculture technology breakthroughs, challenges, and tactics identified in the ethnographic engagements, and will take the form of "design sprints," a highly structured process widely used in the US tech industry for answering crucial questions with stakeholders, characterized by mapping the problem terrain, identifying risks and opportunities, concept generation, prototyping, evaluation and testing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.