Design thinking, AI and geospatial technology towards the U.N. sustainable development goals
Space4Good is a social enterprise that leverages Geospatial Technology towards achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. We brought together our expertise because they wanted to explore the value of human-centred design thinking to their business and whether it could help them clarify their technologically-complex service to clients and stakeholders.
The problem the team faced was in order to deliver their service, the company relied on complex interactions and data flows (from data sourcing, visualisation to storing and reporting) and had difficulty in synthesising these into a clean and user-friendly User Interface. It also meant they had difficulty in collaborating internally and communicating their service back to their clients.
My role was to introduce design capabilities by working with a GIS Specialist and a Data Engineer to design a Service Blueprint that encapsulated their entire service delivery.
The assumption was that the technology — leveraging geospatial imaging technology and AI to detect and send alerts about negative environmental events — was powerful enough to get buy-in from external stakeholders in the project. But the challenge was to communicate how the technology worked in a format that was accessible to non-technical stakeholders.
Another assumption was that all team members knew every step in the service delivery — from preparation to data analysis. But it soon became clear that the design methodology identified problems before they became more substantial.
I led the teams through the human-centred design process of the double diamond: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver.
Discover
To design the Service Journey Map, we began the discovery phase with a brainstorming session to identify the actors, channels and user types that would interact with the service. We identified what user had what task and what channel they would interact with for it.
Define
Over the next eight weeks, we had weekly team sessions in which we defined the actions further and iterated on five versions of the journey map. We worked collaboratively and live on Figma. We further engaged the Full Stack Developer in sessions to map out the backend processes of the Service Blueprint.
Develop
We validated the journey map with the Project Manager, then with the complete project team, to identify and implement minor adjustments.
Deliver
The final Service Blueprint was then delivered to the client in an online meeting. While they sought clarification about two points, these sparked discussions about the future state of the service.
The key learning came during one brainstorming session. The engineers had noted data collection, reporting, giving feedback and providing data as several steps of the service delivery and had worked with these expressions up until that day we mapped these out. During the session, I asked what the difference between them was, which sparked a 45-minute conversation around the different types of data, formats, file types, databases and relevant user actions. Simply asking: “what does this mean to the user?” or “What is the action the user takes for this step?” was enough to elicit much more detail about the action and the necessary backend process.
This was a pivotal moment where we realised that visualising these actions and mapping them out chronologically from the perspective of the user revealed that it was not at all clear what the difference between each of these steps was. The visualisation sparked conversations about details the team had not thought about, but immediately integrated these and actioned them into the User Interface design and backend processes.
The Service Blueprint is now a living document which the development team will use to add all product features in the first prototype over the coming weeks.
The human-centred design process itself was helpful to identify and address communication gaps across teams. This helped to prevent potential exacerbation of problems in the future, but also saved Space4Good time and money by eliminating overlapping or repetitive discussions in the future.
Identifying these discrepancies in a lo-fi design artefact meant it was cheaper to iterate and design the process, rather than developing a hi-fo prototype and identifying problems then, which would have been costly in time and labour to develop, test, redesign and redevelop.
The CEO, engineering teams and project managers were convinced of the value of design to simplify complex processes and that the visualisation of internal and user-centred actions helped to communicate their service to clients and external stakeholders.
The teams will roll out design processes across more of their products and across all product lifecycle stages in the future and want to continue to invest in human-centred design capabilities for their organisation.
