When I joined the Morphing Matter Lab, an invention of biodegradable, self-drilling seed carriers, E-Seeds, were recently published on Nature. It was a technical breakthrough that tremendously increases seeds’ germination when broadcasted and could arguably drives a paradigm shift towards aerial seeding.

I joined the lab to help bring the latest technology to a valuable, viable service. While the core technology was invented by our brilliant material scientists and computational designers, we really weren’t sure who to serve and what the market looks like, let alone product design.

I spent quite a bit of time on research and interviewing. Aerial seeding was by no means a space I was familiar with, so I had to immerse myself in expert opinions and a lot of research to understand the problem space. I maintained an inventory to continuously update problems, insights and opportunities I found (fig 2). Curating this easily retrievable and sharable document of interpretation notes accelerated my learning of crux of the problems in a fairly short amount of time.

As the technology was invented already,  I was doing more of the ‘match-making’ of capabilities of E-seeds with appropriate user domains that could benefit from such technology. One promising concept I  pursued early on was ‘interactive fundraising’ - where tree planting donors can leverage E-seeds’ sensing capabilities to adopt and engage with AR trees in real-time.

The idea, while cheerfully endorsed by my fellow designers in the beginning, did not resonate with practitioners; I realized it is just like the ‘putting lipstick on the pig’ type of solution that is not worthy of investment. I decided to pivot.

I came back to my gigantic interpretation notes and synthesized the problem space again. This time, I reminded myself to put aside any preconceived assumptions and avoid thinking too early about the design. I came to identify a wide range of interventions and opportunities that went far beyond a single service or product.

During this process, I made a map to help capture the hotly debated problems in the sector. The map became an asset to inform other sustainable design projects across the lab; and most importantly, it gave me a foothold to evaluate what design concept would be inherently transformative and higher-impact given the complexity of the issues.

I arrived at a concept that enables local communities to monetize through participating in reforestation projects. The platform, Seedit, serves as a marketplace that connects local users to a wide variety of on-demand tasks that span across seeds collection, seeds dropping, inspection and so on, while offering equipment leasing and technical support.

The lab’s existing aerial seeding technology, together with this platform, could make reforestation projects more scalable and efficient than ever. Most importantly, a low-barrier, democratized access to carbon sequestration projects also means that more lower-income populations would benefit from addition income avenue, while influencing notoriously top-down decision making.

Bringing this concept to life, I prototyped the mobile app to conceptualize the key user flows. At this point, designing self-explanatory interfaces were my top concern. As ‘reforestation with phones designed for grassroots’ is a very nascent, experimental concept, there weren’t readily available competitor-per-se solutions for me to reference at all.

I therefore studied design patterns from a lot of drastically different apps case by case -  Airbnb’s map-based search, Uber’s navigation and reward system and so on all gave me some fruitful learnings. Eventually, the final prototypes look intuitive and familiar, even though the subject matter of reforestation may not be:

Putting everything together, I put the research process and service concept into a print design so that it was easier for the lab to share our findings and MVP to other project collaborators and a bigger audience -