Remember how in 2020 the sky above San Francisco looked straight up Blade Runner 2049? That was because of the wildfires in California. And they’re only getting more severe.
The state and federal agencies are accelerating fuel treatments. But planning them can take even a decade. We don’t have that much time — the forests will literally burn down before we act.
Wildfires (the non-profit group, not the actual wildfires!) is here to regain control over the crisis. We teamed up with them to design a centralized system to manage projects, track timelines and analyze data.
There are so many people involved in a project, with each expert having different goals, who have been following the same procedures for years. While high-ranking officials delve into the analytics from behind their desks, resource specialists need reliable experience to feed in the data.
Our goal was to streamline the project planning and executing process, making it more accessible, and tailored to the specific needs of users. While environmental planning for forest restoration and fire protection can take months, we embraced the challenge to create a system that generates documents for fuel reduction projects in just hours.
The increasing frequency of catastrophic wildfires has shown the critical need for forest restoration projects. But there are challenges to face.
The current legal framework demands detailed analyses, requiring many lengthy documents and multiple reports from different contributors. The project planning process is decentralized and outdated, causing long delays, sometimes lasting for months or even years.
Thanks to close collaboration with the product initiator, who experienced the struggles firsthand, and conducted initial interviews, we identified that users are not exactly tech-savvy, preferring traditional ways. Our challenge was to design a solution that seamlessly accommodates these users' preferences while introducing new, more efficient technologies.