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Carbon
An operating system that accelerates the decision making of law enforcement by augmenting complex tasks with decision autonomy.
Role
Forward Deployed Designer
Timeline
Jul 2023 - Aug 2024
Skills
User research, Product design, Interaction design
Growing up as a minority in Jakarta, Indonesia, life was not the same as it is in the United States. There were rampant protests, but also rampant riots. Everyone I grew up with was effected by some riot -- we all knew someone who was harmed, raped, killed, or pillaged by a rioter.
Carbon aims to arm law enforcement with the tools to understand what happens on-the-ground so they can make better decisions, but most importantly, hold them liable to their actions given the data they had.
We interviewed and observed 4 commanders and 45 SWAT officers to see how they reacted to events.
* 2019 riots with 200 civilians injured and 6 dead. On the law enforcement side, there were undocumented deaths, but as we conducted user interviews, some of officers had burn marks and talked about their peers' severe injuries or deaths.
Problem #1 / Too Much Information
Commanders are bombarded with information from everywhere as such they cannot prioritize and digest what's really happening.
Problem #2 / Poor Resource Allocation
Not knowing what truly happens leads to poor allocation of resources. There are cases of poorly geared officers accidentally getting sent to areas where rioters are throwing molotov and bricks, leading to officers getting burnt or injured. Contrarily, there are cases where geared troops accidentally crowd small, peaceful protests, unnecessarily agitating them.
Out of respect to the users, further operational details will not be covered.
During a riot, everything happens everywhere all at once, meaning we need to display data in a digestible format.
Feature # 1 / Map View
The map view is a "big picture view," where commanders can see where officers are and understand what each squadron faces. This way they can allocate resources appropriately.
Feature # 2 / Prioritizing what you see
The event monitor view is the "granular picture view," where commanders can watch events unfold. To help synthesize the many unfolding events, our AI summarizes events into a digestible format and ranks areas based on what you should see.
Feature # 3 / Replay and Learn
Officers learn how to deal with protests and riots from dramatized simulations and anecdotes. Carbon provides a report and video replay for officers to replay the consequences of their actions.
Due to sensitivity reasons, the Replay Map view and additional features will not be covered. That said, feel free to check out the Augment website, where you can also find more details about our drone software.
Starting from zero background knowledge, user interviews can only get you so far. In these cases, I learned that you just have to pick one hypothesis, build a prototype fast, and demo it for feedback.
* Nov 2023, one of our many demos
Fail Fast, Learn Quickly
When you see how the users respond and use the product, you get a better understanding of how they really think and behave. We would ship product, at most, every 2 weeks (sometimes everyday), getting it on the hands of our user right after.
This continuous iteration cycle let's you weed out unnecessary parts, understand more nuances, getting you closer to the polished product every time.
Iterating for New Processes
By iterating to the needs of our users, our users fell in love with Carbon, requesting it days before an event. In fact, new processes emerged around our product as they never worked with something like it before. This gave us more conviction that prototypes were crucial since it's impossible to predict new behavior from interviews.
