Designing and developing a premier knowledge hub for experts to solve the global climate crisis.
- Product Strategy
- UI/UX Design
- Engineering
- Brand Strategy
The California Environmental Agency approached Niftic with the goal of elevating research in the field of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal is a new field, and an exciting one that has the potential to reverse the global climate crisis. A growing number of scientists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, NGOs, and foundations are exploring methods that could boost the ocean’s capacity to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. There was no easy way for these stakeholders to share their pioneering work, or conversely, to discover the work of their peers. Niftic joined CEA and their partner Google Labs to conceptualize then create a product–and ultimately a full brand experience–that connects these dots.
We placed Ocean CDR’s unique users at the heart of our strategy.
Through product road mapping, visioning, and story mapping we painted a landscape of Ocean CDR’s varied and unique user types. We focused on addressing only their most important wants and needs to prevent feature creep, an integral step in our process when building a custom product from a blank slate. A user-centered strategy from the get-go also aided in aligning the expectations of client and agency.
We designed and built Ocean CDR... and it's making waves.
Ocean CDR is first platform of its kind for researchers to share and discuss ideas to solve the global climate crisis. This knowledge hub brings together all stakeholders to advance the state of knowledge, build bridges across disciplines, and help the community move towards testing and piloting the most promising Ocean CDR approaches.
The Approaches section of the platform outlines all the ways Ocean CDR sets out to boost the Earth’s natural carbon pumps, providing a common language for discussions and categorizing academic papers.
In the Forum section members can start discussions, tag them by approach and keyword, and join in on existing conversations.
The Resources section of the platform is a catalog of user-uploaded articles. Members can search by article name and filter by approach.
The Community section is the networking core of the platform. Here users can search for other members, their projects, events, and job postings. They can also join institutions or projects, and share their own research with peers.
Seizing the opportunity to build brand trust via the platform, CEA asked Niftic to refine the Ocean CDR image.
We provided a custom logotype and icon set for Ocean CDR’s large taxonomy system, in effect boosting the total brand experience. These will serve as key pieces of the Ocean CDR identity as the network grows and continues to push boundaries.
