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Bridging Global Divides with Tracking and Tracing Technology

This double-blind peer reviewed paper focuses on designing to track ethical food production along value chains, with the participation of Indian coffee and Fairtrade Chilean wine producers, supported by the EPSRC's Bridging the Global Digital Divide programme (2006-2009). The project involved multidisciplinary researchers on three continents, with Light as research director, working with small producers in remote regions to co-design a tool for showing the provenance of ethically produced foodstuffs. Bringing advanced technology and participatory design concepts together, the paper describes the first work on automatically capturing product identity data in developing regions (including barriers to adoption). It puts engineering research into context, showing how performance-informed techniques reveal the potential for and limitations of sharing producer information along the chain and how this might impact on social and economic systems. It concludes that technologies based on radio frequency identity (RFID), and even barcodes, have outstripped the capabilities of small producers, who use paper-based logging systems; that there are new political complexities to making information public; and that multiple literacies would need support in opening a conduit worldwide between producers and consumers. The continuing legacy has included an invitation to participate in the University of Exeter’s day on Trade Justice, January 2013; an invitation to join Council on the Internet of Things (http://www.theinternetofthings.eu); several papers (eg Light, A. and Anderson, T. (2009) 'Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development' in Proceedings of ECSCW 2009, 21-42. London: Springer) and a peer-reviewed chapter on provenance in Cook, Grow, Eat (MIT Press 2014). The paper’s ethical insights were further disseminated in the ACM’s Interactions magazine (Light, A. 'Digital interdependence and how to design for it', interactions, 18(2), March + April 2011) in which the ethical angle of technology’s potential to marginalise small players was developed.