Représenter l’activité pour ouvrir l’exploration et l’imaginaire des concepteurs : le cas de la conception d’artefacts pour la transition agroécologique

To address the issues of sustainability and transitions in the primary sector, many actors, scientists, R&D actors and agricultural advisors are designing tools or services to help farmers change their agricultural practices. They are looking for support in making future users a part of these design processes. In this article, we compare two interventions that we carried out with these actors while they were exploring new ideas for tools or services, i.e. at an early stage in the design process. We present the projects during which the interventions took place, and the way in which we have represented the activity of potential users to help designers profoundly rethink the tools and services conceived to support farmers’ agroecological transitions. We focused on two key issues: representing the diversity of farmers’ action logics, and highlighting the systemic and collective dimension of the activities to be equipped (in the sense that they involve actors other than farmers). After showing how this opened up new avenues of exploration for the designers, we discuss the issues involved in evaluating the effects that the supports and, more broadly, our approach, may have had on the transformation of the designers’ activity. We also open the discussion by pointing out the need for ergonomists to acquire methods for representing a transforming activity such as the one implemented by farmers engaged in agroecological transitions.