Analysing farming system design activities in the light of Design Studies concepts
Résumé
Major environmental challenges and increasing societal demand for food and non food products lead to the necessity of a deep redesign of farming practices (Meynard et al., 2012). This redesign generates a great deal of research in agronomy, about innovative solutions. Design Studies (Cross, 2007), which focus on the nature of design processes and their organization (e.g. Detienne 2006, Le Masson et al., 2013), provide useful concepts to address the methodological challenges that farming system design is now facing. Design is an active and deliberate process aiming at generating simultaneously concepts and knowledge, which might result in new products or new technologies, used by actors. As innovation is not only the aggregation of existing knowledge, design is a bridge process between research (as an activity of knowledge production) and innovation. In this paper, from our experience of several case studies, we analyse design in agriculture in the light of two concepts proposed by the Design Studies, innovative design and users’ activities