The climate calculator Elsa has the chance to win Sweden’s biggest and most comprehensive design award!

Design S selects three projects in the “Digital Products and Services” category every two years. Elsa is one of three nominees and is competing against multi-million dollar companies Kivra and EY Doberman. Designer Benedetta Crippa worked closely with Lina Persson to develop the Elsa calculator into the user-friendly web application it is today. We met Benedetta who has led the design of the platform, from sketches to online distribution and communication.

– It feels important that the jury decided to highlight a project where artistic research and design expertise meet in the effort to build a more just world. Artistic research rarely gets out of the closet, as it is still uncommon for researchers or public institutions to invest in design and communications, and Elsa represents an exception to this. Our main objective with Elsa was to make the work of Lina Persson and her colleagues accessible to the widest number of people, and show that there’s no greater synergy than the one between the arts and design.

Can you tell us more about the design process for Elsa?

– We were a team of just 4 women working tightly together: Lina Persson as project leader who also secured the funding for the online calculator, myself as the artistic director and designer, Ilaria Roglieri as web developer and Lena Kempe as advisor through the process. Me and Lina were already collaborating on the visual identity of her research work. We discussed her original calculator in Excel and I proposed to bring it to the next level to an online, open-access application. While projects of this kind can be overwhelmed by a high number of stakeholders, as well as big and costly teams that are typically male-dominated, for Elsa we kept the team small and agile, with frank feedback and trust at the center of our working process. Sustainability calculators also normally do not shine for their design qualities, since the process is most often led by a team of science specialists. For Elsa, Persson trusted us with putting design at the center to determine the experience the calculator creates, making the estimation of CO2 a fun and explorative process. It is fantastic to see the work of a public institution, artistic research and design highlighted at this level. We hope Elsa will reach far and wide!