45 min. talk
Considering the Internet of Things beyond human and device interactions, and in the context of agriculture. What is the value in devices communicating directly with plants and crops?

IoT
Data
Environment (Agriculture)
Sustainability

We used to think of the Internet of Things as device-human communication, where the human being is the animated counterpart. What if instead of a device, we have a living being such as a plant or a crop? In our talk, we’ll guide you through the discovery of how information architects and UX designers can help shape the agriculture of tomorrow. We’ll do it by showing how digital technologies and agriculture come together. Technologies like Ortotica Cloud Console and Amazon AWS IoT platform have been the playground for precision agriculture. Precision agriculture is the answer for healthier, sustainable products, with less environmental waste, aiming to have real time control of the plant’s growing condition, nutrient intake while protecting the overall crop.

Taking advantage of information technology, farmers and agronomists can collect precise data about their fields and use that knowledge to customise how they cultivate. Sensing and predictive analytics can be used to make smarter decisions, but smarter decisions need us to put data together meaningfully and smarter interfaces to help people read data and act upon them. That’s where IAs and UX designers intervene.

No matter how sophisticated sensors and technologies are, focusing on real users’ needs, designers can help by selecting the right amount of data and content to make these systems informative, while organising them in information spaces that can be easily accessible and understandable. We’ll show with a live demo of how, from a site-specific activity, farming can be transformed into a remote control system: an Italian farmer, one of the main European rocket salad farmers, switched to a remote monitored agriculture to produce an even healthier and sustainable product.