Abstract
Smart agriculture promises higher productivity and resource efficiency, yet most implementations remain technology-centric and overlook systemic issues of stakeholder inequality, process opacity, and rural marginalization. This paper introduces Co-Creative Digital Twins, a novel framework that fuses digital twin technologies with value co-creation principles to enable circular and sustainable service design in agriculture. We first review the evolution of agricultural technology—from mechanization through precision farming to digital twins—and situate digital twins within circular-economy and participatory design literatures. We then present a mixed-methods study comprising industry pilots (“Adopt a Cow” and Infarm), rural fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, and a low-cost edge-device prototype using Mixly_Arduino and ESP32. Based on these insights, we articulate a four-stage service flow—(1) Pre-Production Planning, (2) In-Field Intelligent Management, (3) Post-Harvest Digital Distribution, and (4) Modern Customized Mode—each underpinned by modular twin architectures and collaborative governance dashboards. Our findings demonstrate that co-creative digital twins can enhance transparency, rebalance power among farmers, consumers, and intermediaries, and optimize resource use, thereby advancing smart agriculture toward truly circular and sustainable systems. We conclude by discussing theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research directions for scaling co-creative twins in diverse agricultural contexts.
Keywords
Value Co-Creative; Digital Twin; Circular Economy; Participatory Design; Smart Agriculture; Sustainable Service Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.145
Citation
You, L., Liu, M.,and Zhu, B.(2025) Co-Creative Digital Twins: Circular and Sustainable Service Design in Smart Agriculture., IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taipei, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.145
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 8 - Circular-Sustainable Design
Co-Creative Digital Twins: Circular and Sustainable Service Design in Smart Agriculture
Smart agriculture promises higher productivity and resource efficiency, yet most implementations remain technology-centric and overlook systemic issues of stakeholder inequality, process opacity, and rural marginalization. This paper introduces Co-Creative Digital Twins, a novel framework that fuses digital twin technologies with value co-creation principles to enable circular and sustainable service design in agriculture. We first review the evolution of agricultural technology—from mechanization through precision farming to digital twins—and situate digital twins within circular-economy and participatory design literatures. We then present a mixed-methods study comprising industry pilots (“Adopt a Cow” and Infarm), rural fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, and a low-cost edge-device prototype using Mixly_Arduino and ESP32. Based on these insights, we articulate a four-stage service flow—(1) Pre-Production Planning, (2) In-Field Intelligent Management, (3) Post-Harvest Digital Distribution, and (4) Modern Customized Mode—each underpinned by modular twin architectures and collaborative governance dashboards. Our findings demonstrate that co-creative digital twins can enhance transparency, rebalance power among farmers, consumers, and intermediaries, and optimize resource use, thereby advancing smart agriculture toward truly circular and sustainable systems. We conclude by discussing theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research directions for scaling co-creative twins in diverse agricultural contexts.