Carbon, made as readable as weather.
A personal carbon-footprint tracker that turns daily spending and transport into an animated, interactive story of impact.
03 · cover plateSWRM · Footprint recordsEarly-career project, 2017–2018. Carbon impact was a thing people cared about and never opened a spreadsheet for. The bet: if we could make a personal footprint feel as readable as a weather app, people would actually look.
Carbon impact is invisible at the moment of decision. The data exists (transactions, transport), but it lives in places no human chooses to visit. The product had to do the visiting on the user's behalf and hand back something glanceable.
“The numbers are not the story. What the numbers do over time is.”
Three design moves did the work:
Inputs that matched routine
Spending and transport were the only two inputs, both rituals people already had. Logging took seconds, and nothing about the form asked the user to learn anything new.
Animated visualisation
The breakdown didn't sit still on a chart. It rebuilt itself every time a new entry came in. Watching the bars rearrange after a long-haul flight made the maths obvious without anyone having to read a number.
A return reason
The footprint feed was designed to be dipped into, not studied. Three taps end to end on a transaction. The daily ritual had to feel like less effort than it actually was.
Footprint feed
Animated breakdown
Log a transaction
Monthly reviewSWRM is the project I go back to when I need to remember that data products don't have to feel like data products. The screen I'm proudest of from that year is an animation nobody on the brief asked me to build. We shipped it anyway, and it carried the whole story.