Human-Centered Engineering & Design

All Data 4 Green Deal (AD4GD) is developing the European Green Deal Data Space, an infrastructure that seamlessly integrates environmental, climate, and biodiversity data from research, earth observation, sensor technology, and citizen science. Fraunhofer FIT contributes to translating this complex data infrastructure into intuitive tools. To this end, Fraunhofer FIT develops user-centered concepts, workflows, and prototypes that translate technical innovation into practical applications for government agencies, science, and society. 

The EU project All Data 4 Green Deal (AD4GD) aimed to establish the technical and methodological foundation for the Green Deal Data Space by linking environmental, climate, and biodiversity data from diverse sources in an interoperable manner. AD4GD thus addresses a key challenge of the European Green Deal and enables decision-makers to gain well-founded insights from a previously fragmented data landscape.

The Human Centered Engineering & Design department at Fraunhofer FIT ensured that the developed infrastructure was not only technologically robust but also consistently user-centered in its design. To this end, the department conducted systematic requirements and competitive analyses as well as contextual interviews to understand the roles, work processes, and needs of various user groups, ranging from government agencies and research institutions to civil society. On this basis, our team was able to capture user requirements within the context of the complex system architecture of a data space and translate them into human-centered solutions.

Furthermore, we contributed our expertise in design sprints to systematically gather the consortium’s expectations across the three application areas of biodiversity, air quality, and water quality, and to develop individual target scenarios from them. Based on this, we developed functional prototypes that were implemented as user interfaces enabling intuitive access to complex data structures. In addition, our team conducted citizen science workshops that highlighted specific challenges in data interoperability and translated them into technical requirements.

Over the course of the project, it became clear how challenging the translation between highly technical data space architecture and practical usage concepts is. However, thanks to ours methodological expertise, end-user requirements could be consistently translated into system requirements, anchored in the development process, and continuously evaluated. This made it possible to create added value for the operational practices of regional decision-makers, for example in Berlin (water quality) and Catalonia (biodiversity).