In the environment of the startup I touched on multiple tasks, from designing the identity, name, graphics and complementary materials for events and relationship with other businesses, to prototyping and designing the sensor for the data gathering and analysis, and following its production and use in real situation tests. I had the opportunity to work with RibesTech to implement their solar film technology in our device.
The interviews and data that I gathered helped inform a human-centred digital touchpoint that could help expert and administrations day to day to facilitate their operations. I designed a wireframe and did test runs of the various functions, including data gathering and analysis to then define a brief for a development company to implement the digital solution.
This product-service solution would have helped green maintenance providers to have a competitive advantage in public competitions while increasing quality and efficiency of their offer. The real time data analysis being an advantage over the sample-based analysis because even without being integrated in every plant it allows for a more accurate gauge of an area's health. In the end our startup came to a closure because of organizational management, I have grown much since the creation of this business operation and learned much about how to run and see a business project.
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Understanding the context
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The idea and why a start up
One of my first freelance works after graduating from industrial design was to develop a system that could attach to a tree to monitor the position of the plant.
The idea was to deliver real time data to urban green management professionals and municipalities alike in real time, having a system that helped plan effort and gave more data to develop strategies for management.
The collaboration between my employer, Newlog Consulting, an IT firm with a lot of experience, and Demetra, a service provider for urban green management, went very well from a human point of view, and the project was promising, we as a team believed strongly in the proposition and potential effect that the product-service could have on the market. Thanks to this strong belief and lack of funds we as a team decided to spin off the project into a separate and functional start up company.
This act helped accelerate our development and gave us a push to finance our tests.
Personally I wanted to finish a project completely, to launch something on the market and to make it real, as opposed to the practice in university, that stops at some point for a reason or another. I wanted to see where my limits where and if the design that I learned could be improved on a specific direction instead of trying to better everything at the same speed.
Prototyping and making things
The project started before the company existed and in the process we developed a research and gathered data on the current situation in the urban green management space, with the intuition to create a reliable tool that could offer a competitive edge compared to traditional systems.
As of today plants in urban or state owned areas, outside of large reserves, are managed by analysing a sample of the tree's population to have an idea of the situation other plants could be in, in case of notable trees, as historical or at risk are, these are controlled routinely outside of the sample control, finally in a case of emergency, as it is a storm that makes a number of trees fall, the management team is tasked to interveen on the entire area that has been hit.
This method relies to a specialized provider with expertise and people to actually do these operation, and is a part of the budget of local authorities. The problems is that budget often time does not scale with risk and what is been offered to these service providers is not enough to cover for a complete check up of an area, because it also shares its place with other tasks, such as the removal of fallen trees and unwanted branches in example.
The project idea is to give a solution that gives information at any time and keeps the costs in the manageble, while giving a direction for expert to interveen.
The process of gaining information and doing tests on the single plants offer the most reliable and recognized evaluation in the field.
The Fleeck system adds onto this process by having a sensor applied directly on the plants that is able to provide additional data.
To develop a process that could benefit all the stakeholders at the same time, we decided to work on a system that could give information and funcionalities depending on the level of access. In this way the management professional can redirect the client on the platform in which the data are sent to. The platform then also functions as a presentation platform for the expert's clients and shows both the real time data gathered by Fleeck and the regular data and analysis gathered during the check up sessions.
The platform becomes an active work solution as a all-in-one that helps people inside the team to communicate as well as giving a direct place for clients to make requests and have contextual information on the fly.
While our idea was taking form we conducted test sessions with functional prototypes we developed in house, installing the sensor on the trees during regular management work.
The various tests we run helped us define better what we wanted from the product component of our service while also bettering the way we analysed data and the way in which the sensor took part in the regular activities of the industry's professionals.
The development of the physical component required to abide to some limitations in price and technology, for the first round of production it made sense from an economical point of view as well as in consideration with our prototyping mindset to create a flexible and evolving system, in which hardwere components and the product support were easily upgradable and not complicated to assemble and install even to unspecialized personeel.
Conclusions and what did I learn from the journey
When I started my journey into this project, both as an individual and a designer, I thought that the role of a designer was to do design and to be as user centred as possible. While I still think that design and being mindful of a human are the focal point of the discipline of Design, I now think that a designer is a more all-rounded professional. In a way, doing prototypes of lamps and chair is the most real way to define what a Designer should do, to make a project, an idea, into a reality. What's in the middle of making it real and pushing it into the market are the specificity of the single job, the detail that will make it successful or not, while the design job is to make sense of that idea and transform that vision into a reality.
Looking into the time and money that I invested into this project I think that at the end of a process the result is to be evaluated in the real life impact, but also in what the process thaught us as individuals and professionals. Along this process I understood that a designer has to strive to go to the end of the project, even if it means to be the driver of the team, there is not such thing are it is not my job if the job is making it real. Also, even if I did a lot of different things during the time working on this project, even the less designy ones, I probably wasted my effort somehow and did everything I thought should have been done in the situation of getting that specific part of the problem solved instead of designing the "running the company" part of the startup as I was doing to for the design part of my job, this development made me realize that I had been too compartmentalized in my use of design as a set of tool to make things. I am working to change that.
The main problem in the journey that has been this project, is that we as an organization did not do enough. We worked and developed things that are innovative and full of meaning, and that I belive into very much, however, we did not prioritize some of the functions that would have probably helped our company grow and evolve over time.
