Open Forest: an inclusive approach to sustainable forestry

by Marie Spreitzer, Mina Rostami, Regina Gensinger

Sweden’s forestry management is getting increasingly more complex, resulting in the harvesting tasks becoming more demanding and, therefore, a higher workload for the operator. Open Forest is a system that supports the operator in the socio-ecological sustainable decision-making process while harvesting. To investigate this area further, we conducted ethnographic research on four harvest operators and ten operator students. We worked together in co-design sessions with various partners, including forestry experts and machine manufacturers. Our research result pointed towards a lack of planning and feedback during harvesting and the exclusion of multiple stakeholders from the process. To ensure continuous data flow and transparency through the procedure, we designed a system that gathers quantitative and qualitative data on a collaborative, decentralized map. Our design transforms the currently linear planning, doing, and (sometimes) feedback into a continuous, circular workflow.

1 | Background & Collective Research

Read more about the project background and our user research approach here:

Sustainable decision-making in forestry

2 | Research Insights

We discovered that the work could be seen as a linear process:

First, there is planning (creating the cutting plan with information about the area), followed by the operator doingtheir work (making difficult decisions while harvesting, felling trees, bucking them), and at the end (in seldom cases), feedback (the work manager going through the site and providing feedback).

There are two main problems with this approach:

• This is a linear process, so all the information is lost in the next thinning in 10–20 years.
• There is a trend that Swedish forestry will move more towards continuous cover forestry, which means more decisions for the operator since the process will be more complex.

With increased planning, supported by feedback, we could ease the operator’s decision-making process and help them make more sustainable decisions. That’s why we suggest a circular system. This would ensure that planning will inform doing, feedback is collected, and could tell the planning again, making the planning easier.

On this basis, we formulated four How Might We questions to look into further:

• How might we ease the decision-making process of choosing the “right” trees during thinning through feedback and increased planning?
• How might we make planning and feedback collaborative by including external stakeholders (Sami community, Nature, Industry, etc.) in the process?
• How might we measure the harvester’s impact through data collection while thinning and use this information to improve future planning?
• How might we introduce long-lasting feedback mechanisms that will inform the planner and operator to decrease mental load while harvesting?

3 | Co-design session

Upon collecting all of our insights and identifying the potential focus areas of our team, we invited some of our stakeholders (Skogstekniska klustret, Komastu, Swedish Agricultural University, Paper Production Company, and Forest Owners) to present our findings. After the presentation, we also coordinated a co-creation workshop with our stakeholders to gather their thoughts and ideas on the focus areas we identified to help us move forward in our concept ideation phase.

4 | Design Explorations

To answer those questions, the three of us started to ideate with different design methods, tools, and approaches. We wanted to combine all three parts: planning, doing, and feedback in a coherent way. By writing down different scenarios of how the future could look, we decided on one possible way to create this response.

Feedback Workshop

To ensure our ideas align with the stakeholders’ world, we had the chance to invite operator students and forestry experts to the university and gather feedback on our ideas. Together with their input, we could adjust our focus areas.

Summarizing the Workshop

We devised a service blueprint from which we could draw out the crucial touchpoints of the product, an open map, that we had in mind and which we want to display to make our idea tangible.

Our areas of focus that we included are:

• a stakeholder giving input at the beginning of the planning phase,
• a planner considering the input and planning the harvesting,
• a harvester who receives the information in a filtered way, providing them with helpful (and by choice limited) recommendations, and
• the possibility to give feedback after the harvesting has been done.

Drafting first screens + Testings

We know that testing is the best way to go forward, so we had no time to waste. In various rounds of iterations, we started to draft the first screens and tested the concept and usability with various people.

5 | Open Forest

One System

Open Forest is an open, decentralized map. This allows data to be stored in a transparent, long-lasting way which will fuel the next circle of harvesting and enable different actors to come together to work on the future of Swedish forests.

To explain to you what this system looks like for different stakeholders, let us introduce you to our four involved people:

• the forest owner: Per
• the planner: Emelie
• the harvest operator: Sandra
• the stakeholders: Amanda (part of the Sami community), Linda (community representative) & Victor (expert on biodiversity)

One Scenario

Planning

• Per would like to start the process of harvesting in his forest. He takes out his phone and marks his land ready for harvest in Open Forest.
• Amanda, Linda & Viktor get an invitation to look at this newly marked area on their phones.
• They now have the chance to add comments and state their interests.
• Emelie is on her way there to have a look and prepare the cutting plan.
• While walking through the forest, she uses her tablet to read the comments.
• She then uses it to mark different trees through an augmented reality feature so that the harvest operator knows which ones they should leave or which area they should not drive over.

Doing

• Sandra gets to the harvesting site. While she is driving, she can see through her windshield, which shows her two sorts of information:
• There are trees marked with orange. These are the trees that should be left;
• Trees marked in cyan are the trees the system suggests she could cut since they are sick;
• And for all the other trees which are not marked, she has the autonomy to decide which ones to take or leave.

Feedback

• After each day, Sandra gets input from the system on how many trees she left and how well she cared for the tree density and biodiversity.
• The system also updates the map in real time. This gives Amanda, Linda & Viktor a chance to see what is being cut.
• They can now provide feedback on how happy they are with the cutting, which helps the company improve its collaborative practice.

The Touchpoints

As you can see, different people are using Open Forest:

• We have stakeholders who can join Open Forest on their phones. They can comment on the map in the planning phase but also give feedback;
• We have the planner, who uses a tablet to create a more accurate cutting plan and takes other stakeholders’ interests into consideration;
• And we have the harvester operator who sees the information as an augmented reality vision inside their windshield.

The Experience Prototype

Since our final result is based on the interconnectivity of different devices, we displayed those touchpoints in an exhibition for interested viewers to experience how the system works together. People could act as stakeholders, comment and give feedback. These comments would then show up at the planners display in real-life. There the viewers could mark different trees which would then be visible in our constructed harvester. It was a great way to showcase the complexity of the system.

6 | Design Opportunities

Open forest is definitely a daring system. In the short time that we had to come up with it, our focus was not on thinking every detail through but instead seeing the opportunities that we could open up with it:

• We see the chance to connect people with different interests in the forest to discuss it.
• We can use decentralized data to keep the harvesting operations transparent.
• We see the chance to ease the operators’ workload by introducing a system that utilizes the knowledge of more than one actor to make decisions.
• We see the chance to move forestry into a more ecologically sustainable direction by preparing for continuous cover forestry.

You made it to the end!
Thanks for reading, and be sure to reach out to us with any questions or feedback.