Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme

Education & Research

Background

“RIOT” is a Risk Impact Online Tool that enables users to visualise the impact of climate change related risks on industrial plants with high carbon emissions (such as power stations, steel foundries and cement works).

Skills

HTML5/JavaScript, Azure and various Services (PaaS) and Azure Functions, SQL Server(Lite)​, UX/UI Design & Prototyping

Services 

Our contribution to OSFP

What We Did

Elemental are working with Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme (OxSFP) to transform their existing beta tool into a consumer-grade web-based application addressing the fundamental useability and performance issues with their beta version.

We embarked on a product discovery to clarify the purpose of the application and highlighted the key features for the intended user base. Following which we ran two parallel streams of work:

  • User Interface Prototype – focus on guiding new users through using the application
  • Technical audit of existing system to understand how to address performance issues and capture lessons learnt from initial implementation

The output of the discovery was a Technical Proof of Concept in which we demonstrated the feasibility of the browser to:

  • Manage “asset portfolios” selecting subsets of assets into portfolios from potentially many hundreds of thousands of plants
  • Generate and render complex geographical visualisations

With the technical assumptions validated we have now re-architected and rebuilt the solution, and in doing so, reduced the data flow between a user’s browser and the server side and placed the “boundary of trust” firmly onto the users desktop, rather than the server side – issues which were highlighted in our tech audit.