Mitsubishi Carbon Marketplace
Design as a thinking tool
Responsibilities
Product design, UX strategy, prototyping
Tools
Figma, FigJam
Timeline
1 week
Project overview
Mitsubishi Corporation was evaluating whether to enter the voluntary carbon market. The strategy team had done the research, but every time they tried to discuss it with leadership, the conversation stalled. Carbon markets are dense: unfamiliar terminology, opaque pricing models, regulatory assumptions that shift by region. For executives outside the space, it was hard to picture what a "decarbonization trading desk" would actually do.
I was brought in to make the abstract concrete. Not to build a product for launch, but to build a prototype that could anchor a conversation. Something a room full of C-suite executives could look at together and react to.
The core tension
Early discussions about the carbon desk stayed theoretical. Without something tangible, basic questions kept looping:
What kinds of projects would we even consider?
How do you compare one carbon credit to another?
Where does the risk actually sit?
Slides weren't working. The concepts were too unfamiliar, and the stakeholders were too senior to sit through a lecture on carbon market mechanics.
I realized the prototype didn't need to explain the market. It needed to help people reason through it—to give them enough structure to form their own questions and surface their own concerns. The goal wasn't precision. It was clarity.
Making the Unfamiliar Familiar
Carbon trading is complex. E-commerce isn't. Rather than invent a new paradigm, I borrowed one executives already understood: the marketplace.
Projects appear as scannable cards. Filters let you sort by credit value, technology type, geography. The architecture feels immediately navigable, even if the content is new.
This was a deliberate tradeoff. A real trading interface would look different—denser, more data-forward. But density would have lost the room. I needed stakeholders focused on the assets (solar, storage, reforestation) rather than deciphering the interface.
Orientation before interpretation.
Layering Depth Intentionally
A recurring friction point in early strategy conversations was valuation. How do you assess a carbon project? What matters? What's noise?
I designed the prototype to answer this progressively. The marketplace view gives you shape and category. Click into a project, and a quick-view modal surfaces the financial snapshot: target price, estimated value, credit volume. Go deeper, and you get timelines, diligence considerations, project-specific context.
Information builds the way real conversations do—starting broad, then narrowing as confidence grows. No one needed to absorb everything at once.
Forcing the Concrete Question
The deepest screen—the project detail with a bid sidebar—was designed to provoke.
It includes fields for non-binding bids, target execution dates, and deal terms. None of it was functional. But by making those elements visible, the prototype forced a shift in the room. The conversation moved from "What is carbon trading?" to "Do we actually have the data to make this bid today?"
That was the point. The value wasn't simulation—it was perspective. By making the process visible, stakeholders could test assumptions, surface gaps, and align on what due diligence would actually require.
The conversation changed. Leadership could finally anchor their questions in something shared and visible. Risk appetite, operational requirements, data gaps — these became discussable because they were now seeable. The prototype gave the team a clearer framework for evaluation than months of slide decks had produced. I wasn't involved in downstream decisions about whether the desk moved forward. But that was never really the measure of success.
This project reinforced something I've come to believe strongly: design is often most powerful before a product exists. The most valuable thing I did here wasn't solving a user's problem. It was helping a business ask better questions. The prototype was never meant to ship. It was meant to think with.
Sometimes progress doesn't come from having all the answers. It comes from giving people a clearer way to find the right ones.
