I designed, developed and launched www.distributionscalesolar.com to help electric cooperatives procure 1-10 MW solar projects. This website provides a roadmap guiding users through the solar development process from start to finish, standardized tools and resources, and community events and forums.
The Bicycle Generator Project for At Risk Youth arose from a partnership with Natural Bridges High School: a school focused on sustainability and renewable energy, allowing students to enter the industry directly out of high school.
Through this project, we taught students how to engineer bicycle generators that could power daily appliances. Students researched the potential of human powered energy by conducting a Life Cycle Assessment of the generators to see if they were truly environmentally friendly.
Simultaneously, we taught a media course on film-making, allowing students to creatively document their process while building the bicycle generators.
From this project, I truly saw the impact design thinking can have in education. Conducting a project on human powered energy raised awareness about power consumption, empowered students, fostered collaboration and communication, and gave students tools to enter the green workforce after high school.
Switch 13 is an energy event in Boulder that gives speakers 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, and 5 minutes to present on a topic. I spoke about the importance of using Design Thinking in the solar energy space and gave tips on creative brainstorming techniques.
The Cities Renewables Accelerator is a joint endeavor between Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), World Resources Institute (WRI), and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) to support city efforts to procure renewable energy (RE) by helping identify and act on the measures that are most relevant and impactful for them. The program is fully funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of its American Cities Climate Challenge.
I am currently working on developing a website for this initiative to guide cities through their procurement options and build out associated tools and resources.
Through the Stanford d.school I worked with Off Grid Electric to create solar powered chicken incubators that turned chicken farming into a profitable business in rural Tanzania. To carry out this work, my team used systems thinking to understand the entire supply chain of chicken farming in Tanzania and interviewed locals to understand their needs. We then dedicated months to prototyping and iterating solutions related to chicken farming. We modeled chicken incubators after Toblerone boxes, pool tables, and Ferris wheels and tested different user experiences. We hatched baby chicks in tiny Styrofoam ice boxes and found ways to use passive solar design to lower the energy usage. We worked with the Off Grid electric staff in Tanzania to test our products on the ground and see how our incubator could be used and misused. Today, this low cost, highly insulated solar incubator is distributed throughout rural Tanzania.
After seeing my grandfather struggle with Parkinson’s disease for years, I was driven to answer the question ”How might we improve the quality of life for people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease?”
Power For Parkinson’s provides free exercise classes to Parkinson’s patients and caretakers in the Austin area. For Parkinson’s patients, exercise enhances neuroplasticity and improves gait, balance and speech, drastically improving their quality of life. This was the perfect avenue for me to get involved and answer the overarching question I had.
Through applying the six step design process to this problem, I eventually created the UI/UX interface of an ISO app for participants of these classes. To create this app, I initially researched treatments, programs, and apps that currently exist for Parkinson’s disease. I then interviewed people with Parkinson’s disease, their care takers, and doctors. From this initial research phase, I found a resounding theme: Parkinson’s disease can be very isolating and cause depression, and attending classes helped alleviate these symptoms because it created a sense of community. While there were already existing apps in the Parkinson’s space that focused on exercise tracking, there were none that focused on fostering community participation.
This drove me to develop a multifaceted UI/UX platform that fostered a wellness routine focused on mind, body, and community. Through this app, attendees would have easy ways to track their activity throughout the day, see what classes were in the area with accessible directions and options for rides (via partnership with Uber), and check into local classes. Most importantly, this app would allow people to connect with each other and join a community.
When it comes to finance, there is overwhelming evidence that women invest less frequently than men. This problem drove a team of students at the Stanfrod d.school to answer the question: “How might we get women to invest more?” We empathized with men and women of all ages about why they do or do not invest and gained some interesting insights. We found women would rather invest in something they care about to feel they are making an impact, they do not invest as much as men because their friends do not talk about it often, and they are less risk averse.
From these insights, we chose to focus on building women’s confidence to invest in the things they cared about, which is where the idea for Color My Cause arose. Color My Cause is an app where an individual investor can see what causes they are investing in through associating colors with different causes. With social investment as the core of the project, Color My Cause allows people to see what social causes businesses supported alongside traditional indicators of success in the stock market. This platform would ultimately allow people to invest in what they are passionate about and make money at the same time.
Although this idea did not come to fruition, we tested our prototype on Fidelity, IDEO, and Google employees and received positive feedback.
Buildings constructed before the 1990’s are responsible for 36% of total building emissions and 13% of the total CO2 emissions in the United States. If we want a carbon neutral future, how might we find ways to employ deep energy retrofits on existing homes?
At Rocky Mountain Institute I worked on the REALIZE team using design thinking and expert interviewing to model what the current cost of a Net Zero Energy Ready retrofit is for multi-family and single-family homes.
This work has the potential to make a vast impact in the building energy sector because residential energy upgrades are the top unmet demand among U.S. households. There is a deficiency of action among consumers to make homes more energy efficient due to lack of existing financial models and measures showing that deep retrofits are a viable option. Our goal is to create deep retrofit packages for multiple climate zones across the United States that require little upfront investment and planning from consumers and are easily consumable.
How might we encourage more playfulness in indoor climbing gyms? North Face challenged my team at the Stanford d.school to explore this question. My team interviewed over 60 climbers of all levels and discovered beginners fear judgment, which holds them back from wanting to attempt problems and that most climbers are driven by self-competition.
We used these insights as the basis of our design and The Zen Pro Challenge was born. The Zen Pro Challenge allows climbers to use GoPros to videotape themselves as they attempt a problem. The footage from their climb is then sent to them along with a personal record tracking their progress.
Additionally, the footage becomes part of a photomontage that can be displayed at local gyms. If ZenPro is carried out in all gyms across the nation, this project has the potential to create a the biggest photomontage of people: a photomontage of a creative, non-judgemental climbing experience.
