CalcuCafé

Abstract

Many smallholder coffee farmers in Latin America join cooperatives for increased access to global markets. This requires them to understand their costs relative to a complex sustainable coffee production process. To that end, we designed CalcuCafé, a web-based application for cooperative technicians and coffee farmers to calculate a farmer's costs of coffee production. We iteratively developed and evaluated CalcuCafé's design with members of two coffee cooperatives in Peru. Our research uncovered different expectations about the application between technicians and farmers, stemming from differing backgrounds, goals, and perspectives. Learning to use the application in a group setting helped overcome these differences and facilitated collaboration, resulting in a strong buy-in for the application. Our paper contributes a research and design effort to support smallholder coffee farmers, an underrecognized group at the intersection of HCI for sustainable agriculture and HCI for development.

Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Engineering: Products, Services, Technologies, and Social Inclusivity with a Gender Approach

“…In Latin America, they are joining cooperatives to gain greater access to global markets. This forces them to understand the costs of a complex and sustainable coffee production process [48]. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, social sustainability, and renewable energy resources are determining factors in achieving sustainable smart cities with maximum quality of life for humans [53].…”

Implications of Grassroots Sustainable Agriculture Community Values on the Design of Information Systems

“…Interestingly, such challenges exist even when designing information systems for a narrower scope of the food system. A team of HCI researchers discovered they inadvertently created an information power dynamic in which farmers provided their operational data (i.e., relinquishing ownership) to cooperative technicians via a tool to better understand their own immediate production costs but were not aware of ways that the technicians were using their data, in conjunction with other farmers' data, within the cooperative [45]; this issue was addressed in a second iteration design [46]. Given the collective findings of the ongoing explorations into sustainable food research, HCI researchers asserted that the paradigms and practices of HCI research risk perpetuating the unsustainability of food and agriculture systems [62].…”

“…The research in this paper was completed in a high-income country where there is general access to IT and infrastructure. We are aware that the opportunity to make choices about whether or not to give away one's smartphone or whether to stick with older technology instead of buying a new edition would often not be an option in subsistence farming communities as described, for example, by Leshed et al [46] and Oduor et al [64].…”

Feeding the World with Data

“…This is a problem in HCI proper [22], but it is particularly problematic for the study of food systems, in which rural actors inevitably play key roles. A few studies have looked at the technology needs and practices of rural farms in Global North [49,27] and Global South [28,38] countries. However, there has been less attention paid to commercially available data-driven farming tools, many of which target rural spaces.…”