Seamless Visions, Seamful Realities: Anticipating Rural Infrastructural Fragility in Early Design of Digital Agriculture

Rural infrastructure is known to be more prone to breakdown than urban infrastructure. This paper explores how the fragility of rural infrastructure is reproduced through the process of engineering design. Building on values in design, we examine how eventual use is anticipated by engineering researchers building on emerging infrastructure for digital agriculture (DA). Our approach combines critically reflective technical systems-building with interviews with other practitioners to understand and address moments early in the design process where the eventual effects of DA systems may be being built-in. Our findings contrast researchers’ visions of seamless farming technologies with the seamful realities of their work to produce them. We trace how, when anticipating future use, the seams that researchers themselves experience disappear, other seams are hidden from view by institutional support, and seams end users may face are too distant to be in sight. We develop suggestions for the design of these technologies grounded in a more artful management of seamfulness and seamlessness during the process of design and development.