Design for Tomorrow—Volume 1 | 2021
Urge for Human-Centered Design Intervention for Harvesting Aquatic Food Crops
Abstract
Aquatic food crops which have significant economic importance due to their nutritional value are presently being cultivated globally. Farmers in developing countries still follow the traditional cultivation practices for these crops. Aquatic cultivation is entirely different from terrestrial cultivation in terms of the physical environment, field condition, and cultivation technique. Among different stages of agricultural operations for a particular crop, harvesting is considered to be the most time consuming and requires utmost care to collect consumable part of the crop. The current study aims to understand future research avenues in aquatic food crop harvesting. The paper highlights medicinal/nutritional value, challenges in harvesting, and existing scenarios of available tools and techniques used in the harvesting of aquatic as well as terrestrial crops. It will help to identify the future scope of research toward design intervention to reduce the drudgery of aquatic farmers and improvement of productivity of aquatic food crops. For this purpose, relevant literature was searched from the major three electronic databases, namely Web of Science, Scopus, and Google scholar. A prominent research gap was found regarding the design and development of aquatic food crop harvester considering the key constraints of the aquatic environment. Hence, the attention of agricultural engineers/designers, scientists, and researchers is of utmost necessity for designing and manufacturing innovative tools and techniques of aquatic crop growers. The need of the hour is to strengthen the research and devolvement efforts in this overlooked domain for minimizing the sufferings of the underprivileged aquatic agricultural workers.