Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

My current book project analyzes how changing sociotechnical infrastructures are implicated in changing orientations to time, technology, and labor on the infrastructural edge, based in historical study of sociotechnological change in the small, traditional settler fishing community of Change Islands, Newfoundland and Labrador. I am using lessons from this work to inform contemporary design of infrastructure for digital agriculture by leading an NSF project on the Societal Impact of High-Bandwidth Farm Networking. In collaboration with Hakim Weatherspoon (CS), Steven Wolf (Natural Resources), and the Interaction Research Studio at Northumbria University, our team is integrating social-scientific analysis, research through design, and technical development of cutting-edge farm networking research to understand and improve the societal outcomes of high-bandwidth farm networking.

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

My primary concern is to support and promote the ongoing viability of remote and rural communities. My work focuses on interventions that help to inform and reshape the possibilities that engineers and designers consider when they are envisioning new infrastructures that will have lasting impact in rural communities. To do so, I analyze and communicate the design logics that informed historical infrastructural design and their long-terms impacts on rural communities, and ideate and promote other design opportunities.

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

My direct impact is on academic communities and how they think, which is assessed through citations and how the work is built on by other researchers.

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

Our experience from engaging with the tech-finance industry through our NSF project can be summed up as “You can’t be green if you’re in the red,” a slogan that was shared by one of the organizations we interviewed. While socially engaged entrepreneurs deeply care about the environment, the pressures in the tech-finance sector are brutal and motivations and methods often get torqued to meet them. The result places profit-making first, even if that’s not people’s intentions. A similar dynamic is true in the academic sector, where you can’t be green if you’re not funded and published. Our agency is much less than we wish it was, and is deeply shaped by institutional forces and market demands. This suggests we need to focus design efforts on institutional and economic factors as much as on design ideas for specific technologies and products.

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

We find similar results in our work on social impact within academic computer science. The strategy I would identify would be to name the structural pressures that lead to mission drift and find some concrete tactics to alter those pressures. For example, in our work we found that researchers who addressed social impact felt marginalized because that aspect of their work became punished through the peer review process. We also realized that there were enough senior researchers involved in this type of work that they could band together to change the peer review process, and we did some community-building work to help them to realize it; they have gone on to work concretely to open more spaces for reviewing and publishing this type of work.

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

More reflection on how we can collectively and individually navigate creatively around the structural factors that shape our work.