Desired Outcomes

Desired Outcomes

The Desired Outcomes category contains questions which inquire into ‘[M]eans and ends – the extent to which the technology facilitates and constrains the attainment of users’ goals and the impact of the technology on provoking or resolving conflicts between different goals’ (Kaptelinin et al.,1999, p.33).

To what extend does the proposed SmartBarrow scheme achieve desired outcomes for users?
The SmartBarrow proposal has been well received by key individuals within the potential user base, including collaborators from Transition City Lancaster and local farmers. Local food activists acknowledge that the scheme addresses the central issues they are facing in a pragmatic and well researched manner. The director of Stroudco, the most advanced online and offline local food cooperative in the UK, believes SmartBarrow is a worthwhile line of research (Weir, 2010). The scheme received a measured response from small growers among whom there is an understandable hesitancy in buying into a new technology as the solution to their problems. One local grower with a progressive organic farm expressed a strong interest in trialling the system, and would be keen to incorporate SmartBarrow into her business if the trial showed a demonstrable increase in sales.

What are perceived to be the main limitations of SmartBarrow?
The possible limitations of the system concern both the individual user groups and the holistic system of SmartBarrow.

• Critical Mass

The main limitation of the system as a whole is that a critical mass is needed in order to make it viable. The buy-in to the system by farmers, traders, consumers and collaborators is essential for its diffusion.  We have assumed that after a pilot phase of five farmers, the system would then need the buy-in of 20 farmers in order to meet rising consumer demand. We expect the consumer base to reach 2% of Lancaster District residents, approx 3000 people, in Stage 1 which we estimate as a reasonable assumption at this point. The customer base and the farmers’ capacity have to both grow at a similar pace because a sudden increase in demand can not be met by farmers due to lack of investment and the length of the growing cycle.

• Automation

The farmer is required to change the usual packaging process. A key weakness of the system is the lack of automation in data entry on behalf of the producer. This is due to seeking a balance between cost and simplicity. A highly automated system would be too costly to roll out without significant cash injection, and would not be so desirable by other local food initiatives looking to digitise their own schemes in the future. A simple system is cheap and the hardware is simple enough for local amateurs to build it. The farmer must enter the details of what they have packed into the SmartBarrow QR printer and then attach the QR sticker to the crate of produce. The lack of automation could act as a barrier to the scheme’s adoption and consequently be a limiting factor in the potential impact of the scheme.

Although data entry using the embedded handheld device is quick and simple, as a future expansion it would be preferable to have a crate which automatically detects and records its contents through the use of sensory technology. This would increase the invisibility of the system and by allowing them to not actively concentrate on data entry increase the adoption of the scheme. However, development of such a crate is far more difficult and financial, operational and technical problems would need to be solved first. It can be argued that it is more important to educate the food producers in the benefits of data input to achieve buy-in for the device.

• Recording Consumer History

The intention for an enhanced version of SmartBarrow is to provide consumers with the opportunity to view their shopping history and the origin of products bought. This will allow the consumers to build their personalized local food map. Additionally the system is intended to be enhanced with suggestions based on the previous shopping history as well as the shopping baskets of other shoppers in the style of Amazon recommendations. The realisation of such a system demands complex programming and therefore this aspect of the system will not be available from the start. It is expected that a greater value for this data will be derived through future applications of open data and linked data. Specific usages of this data will be discovered in the future and it is envisaged as an advocacy tool

• Reading QR Codes

QR codes enable the transfer of a relatively large amount of data in a simple manner. Through their usage farmers can embed the information of their produce and make it accessible to the buyer (i.e. either a local independent seller or a consumer) in a convenient way. The weakness however lies in the pervasiveness of QR codes in society. Although they are becoming more commonplace, they are still largely not routinely visible to the population in Europe (Ebling and Cáceres, 2010) and this results in reducing the impact the provenance data of the local food allows. In Europe, QR readers are only installed by default on android phones, and the diffusion of smart phones which are able to download QR reader apps is still not widespread among the potential consumer base for SmartBarrow produce. The only consumer sector in which the QR aspect is worth developing at present is the university student population among whom smartphone diffusion is sufficiently advanced.

• Maintenance

Responsibility for the maintenance of the software and hardware will be assumed by a dedicated person or persons in the SmartBarrow community. The software and hardware will be built using Open Source platforms, Open Frameworks and Arduino. Therefore software support will be provided by the collaborative community rather than a 24 hour helpline as would be the norm in the commercial sector. A benefit of this organic community approach is that it allows farmers to modify their technologies and software in close collaboration with hardware hackers, enabling locally adaptive hardware and software solutions. This means the technology can be adapted as the system evolves, instead of the need to purchase or manufacture new technology. This new connection between Lancaster farmer & hacker which will be made through also has potential future impact and potential in designing and implementing offshoot technologies for local farms.