THE NEED: HURRICANE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, the impact on the power grid was dramatic. Working with Texas A&M, and through an IBM Corporate Citizenship grant, I lead a team to design a Utility Emergency Operations Center Demo.. The demo created in  twelve weeks was intended to help overlay and integrate weather data and services with utility assets such as the power grid, smart IoT and field technicians and crews, This integration would help the utility, first responders and government entitles to better prepare, respond and recover from a weather event. In addition, this demo showed how a common platform for user communication could have great potential to increase safety and efficiency.

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USER RESEARCH:  INSIGHTS DRIVEN DESIGN
In preparation for the demo,  my team spent three weeks doing primary research with the impacted users; utility operations, field technicians, meteorologists, municipal and federal disaster response employees.  We focused on understanding the day-to-day operations before an event and how they responded in preparing, responding and and recovering. The key insights we derived from the research directly impacted the features and functionality we proposed.

 

THE RESULT: USER NEEDS AND APPLICATIONS
The prototype we created allowed Texas A&M and the IBM client executives to understand a future state scenario and how that vision would enable new possibilities . The demo bridged the real human needs of the users with real life application of the Texas A&M power grid research teams.