Designing with nature in mind

I’ve recently been working with Dendra – an ecosystem restoration platform. Dendra exists to restore biodiverse ecosystems at scale through use of ecology, data science, machine learning, and automation.

Around the world, humans have cleared around 2 billion hectares of forest in the last several centuries, creating an area of degraded land roughly the size of Australia.

Like many startups, Dendra plants trees to tackle this huge problem, but it’s more focused on biodiversity than on planting trees alone. Caring about the grasses, the shrubs, the right mix of trees—the right ecosystem—so that it functions and is resilient to threats and stresses like wildfire.

My work with Dendra has been to develop a new proposition to provide automated erosion insights. In short, if the ground isn’t stable then vegetation can’t grow, so understanding how a landform is performing is critical to management and lasting outcomes.

Tech-enabled environmental restoration is an emerging sector (and completely new to me) – but by using a systemic design approach – considering all the elements within a ‘product ecosystem’, we went from 0-1 quickly and with strong signals of market fit. (The product itself is in Alpha – so under-wraps for now.)

In the first few weeks we spoke with a wide range of primary and secondary stakeholders. We found that each new person we met with gave us another piece of the puzzle – even if it wasn’t always the piece we were looking for. Building a broad understanding of the domain and wider context meant that we could map and identify points to leverage to ensure both business and nature thrive.

From these insights, we then arrived at design hypotheses and worked with internal teams (ecology - data science - business) to solve design challenges together and get features shipped quickly. 

 In the realm of digital product development, nature plays a significant role as an often-overlooked stakeholder. In this case, it’s been both the driving purpose and central to our overall product development process.