Research
With 30 hours on the clock, I skipped secondary research and went straight to a primary source. I reached out and secured a phone interview with an active dispatcher at E-Comm, the non-profit that handles 911 dispatch for 99% of BC.
That call changed everything we designed.
Finding #1
Resource tracking was physical
Dispatchers moved fire truck cutouts on a literal corkboard to track unit locations. No digital tracking. No automated alerts. One person, moving cardboard by hand.
Finding #2
Dispatchers manage three screens simultaneously
Incoming incident tickets color-coded by priority. A live unit status table. Radio communication running in parallel. Fire crews receive all updates verbally because they have no laptop on the truck.
Finding #3
The system had gone down before
For eight hours, the team ran emergency dispatch on paper and pen. Call takers wrote updates by hand. Runners carried them to dispatchers. It worked because the information structure was simple enough to survive without technology.
What we can learn from this?
Complexity is the enemy. The dispatcher said it directly: "The more moving parts there are, and if you put a technology glitch in the way, it's miserable." Every design decision we made prioritized speed, scannability, and resilience over feature richness.
