Adobe XD & Golden Gate Raptor Observatory
My passion for conservation and wildlife research led me to volunteer with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (GGRO) shortly after I moved to San Francisco.
For over 30 years, GGRO has been a program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in cooperation with the National Park Service. GGRO’s mission is to inspire the preservation of California raptor populations. GGRO was formed in the early 1980s to track the Golden Gate migration, an annual flight of tens of thousands of hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures, birds collectively called raptors. GGRO research frequently helps aid in the conservation of raptors as well as the ecosystems and flyways on which these birds depend.
The past couple of decades have seen hawk species come on and off of the threatened and endangered species list. But the scientific community still knows very little about hawk migration. GGRO traps and bands raptors as part of their population research but the team has also recently started affixing GSM transmitter units to a few birds each year to study migration paths.
Project Falco was a collaboration between Adobe and GGRO to aid in making migration data more widely available to those outside of the scientific community. Project Falco uses the GSM Transmitter Data collected by the GSM units to display (slightly delayed) GPS locations of banded raptors on a clean and easy-to-use user interface.
The goal of Project Falco was multifaceted and differed depending on the stakeholder in question. The hope for Project Falco from the GGRO staff’s perspective was to utilize the online experience as a public relations tool that would get people excited about conservation research and lead to increased involvement with their citizen science efforts. GGRO hoped that a dynamic interactive experience on their website would incentivize engagement with the public, volunteers, and donors. For example, a member of the public who spotted a tracked hawk in their neighborhood could visit the GGRO website and discover that it’s a female Broad-winged hawk and visit the website in subsequent days to watch the hawk’s migration through Mexico. It was GGRO’s hope that this kind of experience could increase the public’s engagement with their organization.
GGRO staff also felt that historically, the data they collected was not accessible to the public, but was merely shared with a select group of ornithologists and wildlife biologists. Project Falco would allow historic and current migration data to be shared with interested parties just by visiting the GGRO website.
The Adobe design team’s engagement in community projects often had a variety of positive outcomes. At times, many designers, engineers, and project managers work on a product which never progresses to market. Sometimes the halt of a product’s development comes after significant time has already been invested in the product. This can be disheartening but is a common experience and necessary part of realizing great products. As a result, the Operations and Strategy team, including me, was often devising ways to keep the team inspired and engaged in design thinking. One strategy to address this goal was through community engagement projects like Project Falco. The engagements we committed to were often short-term (less than 1 year), creative, exciting, provided great social media content for marketing, required an expansion of team members skillsets, and were well-suited to unleashing creativity. All qualities that make our team stronger and more satisfied in their role.
Additionally, at the time, the design team was focused on overcoming Adobe’s reputation as a dinosaur-like tech company in order to recruit talented hires and interns. Probono engagements with community organizations like GGRO allowed our team to do some guerrilla marketing by adding interesting projects to our portfolio and share these projects during interviews and on social media.
The Adobe design team’s partnership with GGRO was one of the first endeavors the design team made into impactful and sustainable community engagement projects. I analyzed Project Falco critically and developed a robust program for future partnerships which was later adopted by the corporate Adobe sustainability team.