CarbonGraph
End-to-end design of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) platform for environmental impact analysis.
The Challenge
Design MVP in 6 month
CarbonGraph startup has set an ambitious goal to make the world carbon neutral by 2050. To do so more companies are striving to become aware of the carbon footprint of their products. Carbon emissions occur at every step of a product's lifecycle, and thus knowing the carbon footprint of a product means collecting data from its entire supply chain from raw materials to consumers. My objective as designer was to create a Web platform for companies to discover and share the carbon footprints of their products.
kickoff
Understanding Fundamentals and Objectives
To start designing product I need to be familiar with science behind products carbon footprint and understand fundamentals. I have conducted interviews with stakeholders and advisors to better grasp my objectives as well as did reading and research to further deepen my understanding. Here I have listed key takeaways from my research:
- • Carbon emissions occur at every step of product's lifecycle which is distributed in 5 steps as following according to GHG protocol:
- - Upstream - refers to emissions occurring during material acquisition and pre-processing.
- - Production - referred also as scope 1 and 2 emissions, emissions that happen during production of product.
- - Distribution & Storage - scope 3 downstream emission happening during storage and distribution of product.
- - Use - scope 3 downstream emission happening during use of product.
- - End of life - scope 3 downstream emission happening during use of product.
- • Within scope 3 companies and their product are interconnected those to calculate emission of one product we need to consider carbon footprint of other products connected by product supply chain.
- • CarbonGraph platform should help companies to search for suppliers with lowest carbon footprint and without disclosing company's production graph. CarbonGraph will serve as guarantor for accuracy of this data.
- • Users should be able to share their carbon footprint on their website as CarbonGraph embed option, therefore final data output should be exportable.
- • Companies should be able to communicate with each other and be able to request data for carbon footprint and CarbonGraph is serve as medium for these communications.
- • Need for company dashboard UI with carbon footprint metrics.
define
Product Centric Approach
To address these problems I wanted to design carbon accounting software with "Product Supply Chain" in mind. To allow companies to visualize their supply chain and corresponding carbon footprint within our software.
- • Dynamically generate their carbon footprint data per product in a company
- • Search for suppliers within CarbonGraph data base with minimum emissions
- • Discover and Share carbon footprint data with other companies in a product supply chain.
- • Audit and verify their data with CarbonGraph
Product lifecycle sketch
Node editor sketch
UX flow diagram
persona
Tesla Inc, as UX persona
Taking into consideration that CarbonGraph is a B2B SaaS company, main users of the product would be businesses that wish to track CO2 emissions at each step of the product-life cycle, persona defined as a legal person. As a user legal entity representative creates an account with CarbonGraph and can add their products to CarbonGraph database. I used Tesla, as a sample company with made up data and Elon Musk as representative of Tesla creating products on CarbonGraph and designing User Experience around it.
All information posted in designs is solely for visual design and demonstration purposes. It is not intended to represent real emission values of companies, organizations, and their corresponding products. All data values presented are made up and serve for demonstration purposes.
Design
CarbonGraph B2B SaaS platform
I have start my design process by plotting Information Architecture for an App. For purposes of MVP design we have decided to focus our design of proof of concept by creating prototype of Node Editor.
Information Architecture
Node Editor Final Design
Dashboard Design
Design System Components
Color System
Typography System