CIS Grid

Climate Information Services · design diagnostic

Read your climate service as a designed service.

A guided interview across six design dimensions. Rate your service from 0 to 3 on each question and get a heuristic reading: where it is under-designed, and the design brief each gap generates.

See how it works

No account needed, your answers stay in your browser.

Hover or tap a dimension to see what it asks.

6design dimensions
30diagnostic questions
~20′to complete

From forecast to decision

“The distance between a forecast and a decision is not an information distance. It is a design distance.”
A forecast is issued
A decision is made

Between the two lies design work: the touchpoints it travels through, its timing, the back-stage choreography, the behavioural levers, the depth of co-production and whose knowledge counts. The grid asks, dimension by dimension, what has not been designed yet.

The research behind it

The instrument comes from a study that read two operational Climate Information Services in Northern Ghana as designed services, then built a six-dimension diagnostic grid whose unanswered questions become design briefs.

A formative instrument

The grid is used before deployment. A scoping team works through the questions, and every question it cannot answer marks a design decision still to be made.

An attention map, not a ranking

The radar shows which dimensions are under-designed within one service, so scarce attention goes where it is most needed. It does not rank services against each other.

Earned in the field

The questions were tested in four weeks of fieldwork in two farming communities, where a forecast reaches most farmers, and almost all women, through a human relay rather than a device.

Under revision by use

If you choose to contribute, your anonymous ratings keep the grid under revision and show which design knowledge teams most often lack. No personal data is ever collected.

How it works

Three stages, one sitting. Select a stage to see what it involves.

The six dimensions

A synthesis of vocabularies from service design, behavioural science and co-production research, combined into a single reading protocol for Climate Information Services.

See an example reading

Two illustrative profiles, to show what a finished reading looks like before you run your own.

Ready to read your own service? Start the interview.