CalcuCafé: Designing for Collaboration Among Coffee Farmers to Calculate Costs of Production

Many smallholder coffee farmers in Latin America join cooperatives for increased access to global markets. This requires them to understand their costs relative to a complex sustainable coffee production process. To that end, we designed CalcuCafé, a web-based application for cooperative technicians and coffee farmers to calculate a farmer’s costs of coffee production. We iteratively developed and evaluated CalcuCafé’s design with members of two coffee cooperatives in Peru. Our research uncovered different expectations about the application between technicians and farmers, stemming from differing backgrounds, goals, and perspectives. Learning to use the application in a group setting helped overcome these differences and facilitated collaboration, resulting in a strong buy-in for the application. Our paper contributes a research and design effort to support smallholder coffee farmers, an underrecognized group at the intersection of HCI for sustainable agriculture and HCI for development.