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Summary
If you’re interested in seeing the impact user experience designers can have on products tackling climate change, please join us for a free “show and tell” session. Moderated by Michael Leggett, we’ll hear from Manos Saratsis from Station A, Marissa Cui from MIT, and Rachel He from Stripe. They’ll recount the problems, their design solutions, and what they learned along the way.
Key Insights
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Frontier acts as an advance market commitment (AMC) to catalyze permanent carbon removal by aggregating buyer funds and deploying them to suppliers.
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Carbon removal faces profound supply shortages and trust issues due to legacy misconceptions around carbon credits and cheap offsets.
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Design balancing emotional urgency and data density must often be split into separate products targeting different audiences.
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Stripe Climate enables small and medium businesses to fund carbon removal easily by connecting spending to clear impact metrics and storytelling.
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Users of Stripe Climate seek simple climate impact understanding without demanding daily management of their contributions.
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Station A leverages AI to grade and recommend clean energy projects for millions of US commercial buildings using just building addresses.
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Familiar user interfaces like spreadsheets and maps reduce barriers, meeting users where they are and integrating into existing workflows.
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Continuous data refreshes and notifications help keep users engaged and turning their grades into clean energy investments.
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Designers in climate tech must distill complex science into immediate, comprehensible experiences to capture users’ limited attention.
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Storytelling that humanizes suppliers and shows concrete environmental and financial benefits strengthens user connection to climate action.
Notable Quotes
"I always wanted to see the work, not just the finished product, but a little bit behind the scenes and iterations."
"Frontier is trying to build an industry from scratch that supercharges carbon removal on supply and demand sides."
"There’s a tension between emotional storytelling and practical data that makes us consider separate approaches for different audiences."
"Most of Stripe Climate’s users are small businesses intrinsically motivated by climate but resource constrained."
"Our clean energy grades require no data upfront; just enter your building address and get instant insights."
"We made the product look like a spreadsheet because that's how most of our users already work."
"Without catalyzing early dollars toward new technologies, carbon removal can't scale — even though it’s expensive now."
"Station A is the 11th largest deployer of onsite solar in the US with only 15 employees."
"Making the intangible tangible and real is a key role for design in climate tech."
"Users don’t want to actively manage their climate programs daily; they want impactful, hands-off experiences."
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