Climate Coaches
Creating a service for a non-profit with the primary goal of empowering Evanston residents to improve their home’s energy efficiency, helping them reduce their carbon footprint and achieve the city's climate goals.
Studio Project Collaboration With
Team
Samantha Borri, under the guidance of Amy O'Keefe and Dan Butt
Category
Service Design - Communication Design
Skills / Tools
Ethnographic Research - Prototyping With AI
Time Frame
10 weeks
In collaboration with Climate Action Evanston (CAE), we developed an end-to-end coaching service to bridge the gap between high-level climate goals and individual household action. This project orchestrates expert architectural and engineering knowledge into an accessible, human-centered journey that empowers residents to navigate the complexities of home energy efficiency.
To ensure a seamless experience, we mapped the "front-stage" homeowner touchpoints directly to "back-stage" volunteer operations. This systemic view allowed us to automate critical handoffs, such as scheduling and follow-up data collection, reducing the operational burden on the lean CAE team while maintaining a high-touch feel for the resident.
Our solution includes a suite of physical and digital artifacts designed to nudge users from awareness to action. This includes a "Big Impact" recommendation sheet designed to live on the homeowner's fridge, ensuring next steps remain visible and actionable. We also integrated a decision-tree framework to help coaches provide consistent, expert-level advice regardless of their technical background.
The service was designed with measurable KPIs—such as QR scan rates, session completion data, and implementation tracking—to support CAE’s future grant proposals and operational scaling. By establishing a clear training framework for volunteers, we've created a sustainable model that CAE can pilot and iterate upon to meet Evanston's 2026 climate targets.
What made this project special?
Creating a service for an organization that was so invested in it becoming a reality was truly a privilege we did not take for granted. Our faculty and our CAE partners collaborated and guided Sam and I every step of the way to create something special, which I am proud to say is a service CAE is piloting today, working to create it a reality, which is as humbling as it is exciting.
Also, working alongside Sam was amazing, as she was not only a friend but a dedicated designer, focusing on ensuring we used all the tools at our disposal to create something real and impactful, in a short amount of time.
Throughout my graduate program, I’ve seen AI transform industry workflows firsthand. In this project, our team embraced this shift to maximize our impact despite a tight schedule. We treated AI as a force multiplier: using Perplexity to deepen our research into home emission behaviors, Replit to develop an interactive testing environment, and ChatGPT to rapidly iterate on visual storytelling and artifacts. This allowed us to deliver a high-fidelity service concept that far exceeded our initial resource constraints.
Scroll horizontally to review our final presentation.