Fertile Futures
Investigating global trends and blending them with insights about New Zealand farmers and their farming practices to identify opportunities for the future of fertiliser in an increasingly sensitive environmental and consumer context.
In most cases fertiliser is New Zealand farmers’ #1 annual investment. It supports plant growth which supports horticultural returns, dairy output, and beef and lamb production. Farming, once a lifestyle choice where hard work saw families through the down times, is an increasingly complex business dealing with multiple risks that farmers feel less control over including economic and environmental issues and their reputation in New Zealand society.
My job was to facilitate an experience of collaborative research and design in a multi-disciplinary working group of people who represented the business. The experience should be rooted in a deep understanding of farmer behaviour and help develop an innovation methodology ready for NZ’s farming future.
We visually compiled existing insights from customer research, investigated global trends related to food and farming, then brought emerging consumer values together with technology developments and farmers’ needs to identify opportunity areas related to fertiliser. We summarised the opportunities and took them out to farmers to observe responses and test our theories.
To review the opportunities, we told the stories of our conversations with farmers and created alternative, evidence-based scenarios for the future of NZ farming. We prioritised opportunities based on the working group’s knowledge of the business, customer, and future, and then mapped them across the customer journey.
Next steps include co-design workshops around the country.
Project components:
For: The Service Design Company
Client: Ballance Agri-Nutrients
2017
In most cases fertiliser is New Zealand farmers’ #1 annual investment. It supports plant growth which supports horticultural returns, dairy output, and beef and lamb production. Farming, once a lifestyle choice where hard work saw families through the down times, is an increasingly complex business dealing with multiple risks that farmers feel less control over including economic and environmental issues and their reputation in New Zealand society.
My job was to facilitate an experience of collaborative research and design in a multi-disciplinary working group of people who represented the business. The experience should be rooted in a deep understanding of farmer behaviour and help develop an innovation methodology ready for NZ’s farming future.
We visually compiled existing insights from customer research, investigated global trends related to food and farming, then brought emerging consumer values together with technology developments and farmers’ needs to identify opportunity areas related to fertiliser. We summarised the opportunities and took them out to farmers to observe responses and test our theories.
To review the opportunities, we told the stories of our conversations with farmers and created alternative, evidence-based scenarios for the future of NZ farming. We prioritised opportunities based on the working group’s knowledge of the business, customer, and future, and then mapped them across the customer journey.
Next steps include co-design workshops around the country.
Project components:
- Customer Insights: visual compilation of previous customer research
- Trends Research: trend spots and stories based on web research
- Opportunity Areas: opportunities identified from a blend of NZ customer insight and global trend spotting
- In-Context User Research: taking opportunities onto farms to test our thinking and understand farmers’ views and motivations about the future
- Future Scenarios: based on a projection of farmer behaviour from the present day to futures with different consumer values and technology
- Business Priorities: scoring the opportunities against criteria derived from business objectives, feasibility, and customer value
- Future Experience Mapping: priority opportunities mapped across the customer journey from awareness to purchase to application and review
For: The Service Design Company
Client: Ballance Agri-Nutrients
2017
Expand the image to see some elements of my process with Ballance. The process took us from research to a set of prioritised opportunities.