My role: team lead & product designer
Team: 1 product designer, 2 engineers
HOMEdash is a web application incorporating geographical infographics, aiming to inform the status-quo of environmental issues and to inspire actions.
I led the product lifecycle emerging from ideation to prototyping and worked closely with 2 engineers as well as our client Born Global.
Overview
HOMEdash is my engineering senior design project. The client partnered up with Born Global (a non-profit innovation institute) came to our team with a rough idea of designing and building an interactive 3D dashboard responding to UN’s 17 SDGs.
Challenge
4 engineering students tackle an open-ended product design project. The team initially felt very disoriented.
ArcGIS API-powered dashboard that currently displays carbon stock data for over 100+ countries
Context
“Eco-anxiety” is a term that captures experiences of anxiety relating to environmental crises (Hickman, 2020; Pihkala, 2020). Research has shown that eco-anxiety can create mental health disorders for young generations. They are most at risk for the adverse effects of climate issues, but they have the least power to stop it.
Problem
Young people are anxious about environmental issues and need to take collective action to help with eco-anxiety, but they lack the tools.
Secondary Research
Validate our assumption: A survey of 10,000 young people shows that negative feelings about climate change can cause psychological distress
How worried are you about climate change?
Climate change makes me feel…
Competitive Analysis
United Nation Sustainable Development Report provides comprehensive data about the status-quo for each sustainability sectors around the world. However, it is
not user-friendly and cannot be customized by users since what people care can be a mixed of various issues.
Mexico Energy Dashboard
not interactive, difficult to navigate
Design Exploration
Information about the status-quo of environmental crisis and ongoing work to mitigate climate change issues are scattered on the internet. We want to create an integration tool for people to:
The bigger picture
get a sense of world environment performance through data visualization: observe and compare performance globally on climate change issues and sustainability development progress
Inspire actions
provide easily accessible resources about taking action and contributing through existing sustainability projects.
Pop-up design
When users click the bar on the 3D map, the pop-up displays detailed information such as total carbon storage, global ranking, as well as a hyperlink directing to an on-going project within a specific sustainable development sector.
Technical structure
Reflection
What would I do differently?
Dive deeper into user and design research
Recruit potential users and conduct user interviews
More agile approach to product design and development
Next step (our vision)
Further collaborating with a cross-functional team on user testing and design validation
Credit: Alien pixels.