Yellow Pine (Pinus jeffreyi or Pinus ponderosa) is my favorite type of tree. I love the bark’s warm earthy color and intricate puzzle-piece shapes. If you lean right up against one of these trees and stick your nose into a furrow in the bark, you’ll find that they have a distinct and pleasant smell which reminds me of vanilla and butterscotch. I took this photo July 26th, 2020, while hiking with my family in the Sierra Nevada. It’s the time I spend in nature that renews my passion for sustainability-related work.
EcoSketch: Environmental Impact Modeling for Product Designers
The aim of the project is to design a software tool that will make Life-Cycle Assessment accessible for product designers, particularly in the early stages of product development.
Background
LCA is a technique typically used by expert practitioners (often with advanced degrees in environmental science) to quantitatively evaluate the environmental impacts of a product. LCAs generally account for impacts during resource extraction, manufacture, transportation, use, and disposal/recycling. There are several major limitations with the existing software tools for performing LCA:
They are difficult to learn and use, particularly for non-expert audiences (such as our users), because:
The terminology is inaccessible
The UI is dated and unintuitive
Errors and software malfunctions are common
The results are difficult to interpret
They are poorly suited to early-stage design because there is no room for uncertainty in the entered data. Product designers, particularly in the early stages of design, often are not completely certain about:
Which materials will be used
The quantities of materials
How a design might change over the course of the prototyping/testing process
The Project
This project is a collaboration between the Dartmouth Empower Lab, an environmental consultancy called EarthShift Global (ESG) that conducts LCAs and develops software for performing such LCAs, and a product development firm called Synapse, which is in the process of integrating sustainability considerations into its product development processes. One of my roles was to help coordinate the relationship between the Empower Lab and ESG, acting as the primary communication bridge between the organizations.
I conducted self-directed design research on the experiences of expert LCA practitioners: Ten, 30-minute interviews (over Zoom), which I synthesized into a design brief. The brief was centered around a detailed journey map describing the users’ thought processes, with embedded needs and “how might we” questions. It also included personas, UI/UX design ideas, directions for future research, and a review of my research process. I refined the document by requesting feedback from my lab’s professor and from leaders at ESG. The brief excited company leaders and sparked interesting discussion about what they might develop next.
I then leveraged design insights from my research in order to create a high-resolution, interactive prototype using JavaScript, React, and Material-UI. I also facilitated focus groups with the designers at Synapse in order to get feedback which I used iterate on the prototype.
Reflection
Web development and the focus-group facilitation were both new to me (although I have experience with other types of software development and facilitation). Fortunately, this project provided an excellent opportunity to learn: I was able to take the lead on both projects, but had substantial help from colleagues who co-authored tricky parts of the code and jumped in with extra questions during focus groups.
The highlights of the project were the synthesis of insights from design research and the software development – the two tasks where I felt like I was most thoroughly challenged but also had the skills necessary to succeed (flow experiences). Beyond those, this project has helped me develop my self-efficacy as a designer – I took on an ambiguously defined design research project and from it produced my first design brief outside of academia. As my involvement in this project comes to a close along with 2020, I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to spend part of this year learning new design skills and working on something worthwhile.