Designing for High-Stakes Operations

Building a centralized operational platform that enables commercial cultivation teams to monitor and control environmental systems in real time.

Project at Glance

Greenfield IoT platform built for commercial cannabis cultivation facilities in the US legal market

Designed interfaces for multiple environmental systems: HVAC, irrigation, fertigation, lighting, CO₂

Unified experience across operational workflows while preserving each system's unique behaviour

Established the interaction patterns that became the foundation of the platform's operational experience

why this project matters

Commercial cannabis cultivation facilities run on tightly coordinated environments - temperature, humidity, CO₂, irrigation, lighting, fertigation - each historically behind its own interface. That fragmentation overloads operators who need one complete picture of facility health. THC Controls set out to fix that, and my challenge wasn't designing dashboards: it was reducing cognitive effort without oversimplifying the decisions operators make.

Problem & Context

Understanding the System

I'd never worked in controlled environment agriculture, so before designing anything I learned how each system actually works. They aren't variations of one problem: temperature needs live visibility, irrigation is scheduled execution with manual overrides, fertigation adds nutrient management, and lighting and CO₂ follow their own rules. Designing one unified template would have created consistency while destroying operational clarity - so each system got an interface shaped by how it works, unified through structure and navigation.

.platform

Enterprise SaaS • IoT • Controlled Environment Agriculture

.timeframe

3-4 Weeks

.role

Solo Product Designer

.primary users

Commercial cultivation operators managing one or more grow facilities.

.responsibilities

Product Discovery

Domain Research

Information Architecture

Interaction Design

Data Visualization

Design System

Developer Collaboration

.team

Client Stakeholders

Business Analyst

Project Manager

Engineering Team

Design Solutions

Design Decision 01

Interfaces Shaped by Operational Behaviour

Why this matterd

Monitoring needs immediate visual feedback; configuration needs richer controls; irrigation and fertigation need scheduling front and center. One layout can't serve all three.

Exploration

I mapped how operators interact with each system - what needs continuous visibility, which actions are frequent, how fast issues must surface - then built a consistent structural framework that lets each system adapt its visualizations and controls to its operational purpose.

impact

Flexibility without fragmentation: each module communicates its own way, and the platform stays cohesive.

Design Decision 02

Building Unity Without Sacrifice

Why this matterd

Specialized interfaces create a new risk: if every module behaves differently, operators relearn the product constantly - cognitive effort in exactly the wrong place.

Exploration

I identified what stays constant across every system - navigation, page hierarchy, status indicators, layout behaviour, interaction patterns, reusable components - and made that the shared foundation.

The Decision

Each specialized system sits on that foundation. Navigation stays predictable, components keep visuals consistent, and specialized controls appear only where they support real operational decisions.

impact

Consistency didn't come from making everything look the same. It came from shared structure and interaction principles - one coherent product that still respects each system's workflow.

Outcomes & Reflection

The Balance

The end state is one workspace for previously disconnected systems: monitor facilities, configure environments, run daily operations - each system specialized, the whole unified by a shared design language and predictable navigation. That balance turned a technically complex environment into faster understanding and more confident decisions.

What I Learned

It was tempting to see this as a set of dashboards. Deeper in, the real challenge was supporting different kinds of operational decisions - and the only way to see that was understanding the systems first.

Understand the system, then design interactions that support how people actually work. It's shaped every complex product I've taken on since.

.see also