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Cradle to Cradle

Chemical Screening App

  • Cradle to Cradle

  • Challenge

    C2CPII wanted to build a pathway tool for early-stage material innovators, but weren’t clear what these innovators might need.

  • Solution

    Let the innovators screen their chosen materials against a database of chemicals to determine their health and environmental impact.

  • Results

    An Elixir + React application with an intuitive interface that lets product designers easily screen their materials for potential hazards—built in just 5 weeks.

Material wise. The Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (C2CPII) is a non-profit organization that educates and empowers consumer product manufacturers to have a positive impact on the environment and society. Knowing C2CPII wanted to develop a tool for these innovators to improve their development process, Viget interviewed material innovators to research their needs. Then, we worked with C2CPII to concept and build an application that gives users the ability to easily find out whether the materials they plan to produce contain any potentially hazardous chemicals.

Design + Development

Sprint-Style Collaboration

One of our main challenges with this project was its tight timeline — a quick five weeks to create a functional product. In that time, we conducted stakeholder interviews with over a dozen consumer material developers, then worked with C2CPII to define requirements, design, and build out the application.

Technology

Elixir + React

We applied modern thinking to the front-end and back-end software for the screening app, opting for a cutting-edge combination of Elixir and React. This tech stack allowed us to minimize turnaround time, rapidly getting a staging environment and a functional prototype up and running in two weeks.

User Interface Design

Accessible Complexity

The UI of the screening app lets users, while in the early phases of creating a new material, validate the safety all its constituent ingredients. They can drill down into nested chemical structures and reference restricted substance lists, all in a sophisticated interface based on branding and identity that we designed and implemented.

Summary

We designed and built a screening app that lets users check new materials for safety, all in only five weeks. Promoting the idea that sustainability should be considered early in the design process, the app uses Elixir and React along with a new visual identity for a business tool that feels more like a consumer product.