Food forest design canvas : operationalising permaculture-inspired principles in software development
Puerto, Melissa (2026)
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Diplomityö
Puerto, Melissa
2026
School of Engineering Science, Tietotekniikka
Kuvaus
This thesis is available in the LUT University archive. Contact: asiakirjat@lut.fi
Tiivistelmä
The Food Forest Design Canvas describes what a digital planning tool for regenerative agriculture would need to hold, and leaves the requirements, the architecture and the implementation open. The permasoftware principles carry the logic of permaculture into the software development life-cycle, and until now they had not been taken through a full development cycle. This thesis builds the one inside the other, and records what the principles did to the reasoning along the way.
The study follows Design Science Research with reflective practice and user evaluation. Seven interviews with eight people across six countries produced five themes, which became a prioritised requirements specification. The canvas was implemented as Kuxtal, an offline-first web prototype released under a copyleft licence, with every significant decision recorded as it was taken and a weekly journal tracking how the principles were used. The prototype was then evaluated with practitioners in think-aloud sessions and through a three-layer accessibility evaluation.
The principles acted in three registers, as architectural defaults inherited once, as gates a feature had to pass before it was scoped, and as prompts at the moment of a single technical choice. Four tensions recurred, energy efficiency against developer time, features against simplicity, useful precision against the safety of the person holding the device, and convenience against sovereignty. A structured self-assessment across nine principles and seven lifecycle stages was strongest in planning and design and weakest closest to running software. Practitioners assigned the greatest value to attributes that were not directly observable, namely the retention of records exclusively on their own devices and the absence of any requirement to create a user account. The permasoftware principles made the relevant trade-offs explicit at a stage when there was still sufficient time to make an informed and deliberate design decision.
The study follows Design Science Research with reflective practice and user evaluation. Seven interviews with eight people across six countries produced five themes, which became a prioritised requirements specification. The canvas was implemented as Kuxtal, an offline-first web prototype released under a copyleft licence, with every significant decision recorded as it was taken and a weekly journal tracking how the principles were used. The prototype was then evaluated with practitioners in think-aloud sessions and through a three-layer accessibility evaluation.
The principles acted in three registers, as architectural defaults inherited once, as gates a feature had to pass before it was scoped, and as prompts at the moment of a single technical choice. Four tensions recurred, energy efficiency against developer time, features against simplicity, useful precision against the safety of the person holding the device, and convenience against sovereignty. A structured self-assessment across nine principles and seven lifecycle stages was strongest in planning and design and weakest closest to running software. Practitioners assigned the greatest value to attributes that were not directly observable, namely the retention of records exclusively on their own devices and the absence of any requirement to create a user account. The permasoftware principles made the relevant trade-offs explicit at a stage when there was still sufficient time to make an informed and deliberate design decision.