Adobe XD Creative Jam
Designing to enable climate change action
Roles // UX Designer
Tools // Paper/Pen & Adobe XD
Timeline: 2 Day Design Challenge
Overview
Climate change is a serious issue. As designers we have the power to help create products to help those fighting to protect our planet. For our project, we chose to address the problem of current inefficiencies of managing and extinguishing wildfires from aerial helicopters in the United States. Wildfires are a dramatic and direct result of climate change. Particularly, in the western U.S., they are growing by number and size each year.
Ideation & Brainstorming
As climate change impacts so many areas of our lives, choosing a unique and innovative idea was both exciting, yet challenging. Our team was limited on time and wanted to focus the majority of our time on research and design. Coming up with an idea quickly was critical. We used feasibility mapping to rate our ideas by accessibility, achievability and measurability. The concept we decided on designing was a mobile app and in-vehicle dashboard screen to improve the effectiveness of aerial firefighting, and improve the safety of the pilots and workers on the ground.
Research
As our time was limited and we were not able to conduct interviews and extensive research, most of our findings were conducted through researching the web.
In many situations, air tanks alone cannot extinguish wildfires; they merely slow them down. The on-ground Fire Marshalls are needed to come in and extinguish what remains. Optimizing the channel of communication and data flow between these two teams can equip them with the necessary tools to tackle the longer and wilder fires that have been observed recently.
Design
To address this problem, our team decided on a two-part design involving both the aerial firefighters and the on-ground Fire Marshall. Our design is simple, yet robust, featuring both an in-vehicle screen and mobile app for the users on the ground. Both devices have access to radar, terrain, and drone views of the wildfire. Users have the ability to toggle between radar and terrain, via touch button and voice command. They also have the ability to view the in-air done and pinch to zoom feature around to see a 360 degree view. Voice commands are also available for going to the “Home” page and calling the “Emergency Contact”. Calls can be made to the air or ground from the Pilot or Ground Marshall. Other functions can be ran in the background while on calls. Both devices also display real time weather data such as temperature, windspeed, humidity and current visibility.
Homescreen wireframe
Flow for mobile and vehicle screen
Typography, color and logo design for our prototype
The back-end development of our product features an algorithm that calculates optimal water drop points for the pilot. Geospatial data collected from the drone, feeds the system real time information that recommends a route for the pilot to take. This output is communicated via a visual representation of the paths and drop zones in the navigation system of our product. The coordinates are stored in the form of vectors, making it easy to transfer information between our system and pre-existing tools used by firefighting teams. Ultimately, Ariel accomplishes our goal by creating a more efficient way to manage wildfires.
Prototype Interactions
