THE NEED: FIRE SEASON
As fire season approaches in California, utilities need to understand the risk extreme weather has on their assets and power grid.  Energized assets combined with high winds and other factors can start significant fires that impact the environmental and safety of the population. Timely and accurate forecasts in a highly regulated public environment makes it critical for this utility to identify weather events and determine when to de-energize assets to prevent fires.

 

DESIGN THINKING: METEOROLOGISTS ARE IN NEED
My team was asked to quickly research the impacted users, primarily utility meteorologists, and prepare and facilitate a two-day Design Thinking workshop. Design Thinking allows the team, both internal and client, to quickly understand who the users are and build empathy for how they are doing their job today. 

 

What we discovered is that today (the as-is scenario) utility meteorologists are gathering information from numerous disparate and uneven sources. Often times they have information overload and are trying to blend the art and science of creating accurate and timely forecasts in a high stress and quickly changing environment.

 

THE RESULT: ONE WEATHER TOOL

Based on the experience road-map, storyboards and to-be scenarios we designed a weather application that merges the many data points of weather maps and modeling with cutting edge visualizations and cognitive predictive modeling (a fire probability index).  While this is a long-term plan (the wedding cake) we can scope features in the near term to enable only those items that solve real problems for the actual users.