In the Breeder’s Shoes

Introduction

In Tanzania – as in many parts of Africa – growing beans plays a crucial role in ensuring food security, improving agricultural productivity, and increasing financial stability. The Alliance’s Artemis project plays a key role in enabling bean breeding programs by developing an AI-supported phenotyping technology that will improve the productivity of these programs across Africa. In this transformation process, human-centered design plays a crucial role in understanding the existing breeding practices, and identifying the needs for advancing phenotyping solutions within Artemis. Moreover, this approach identifies suitable entry points for the integration of the phenotyping tool into farmers’ planning practices.

Insights Collection

During the exploration stage we aim to understand who we are designing for, and what the  breeding program looks like day-to-day. To achieve this goal, researchers from Artemis conducted one-on-one interviews with four national breeders and eight breeding team members during a visit to Tanzania. The researchers gathered valuable feedback and insights from these interactions, and accompanied phenotyping teams to the field, observing farmers’ day-to-day processes that provided another layer of insights.

Synthesizing Insights – Distinct Breeder Personas and Experience Map

After an intensive insights collection process, the next step was to synthesize research findings. To do so, we created two main design artefacts to aid the design process, informing the characteristics of the product: