Our team is based in British Columbia (BC), Canada, which has been plagued with frequent wildfires in recent years. This challenge therefore is very much relevant to our personal interests in contributing to our local community. Since we are both User Experience Designers, our main priority was to create something pragmatic and intuitive to use.

For research, we looked at submissions from last year's Spot That Fire v1.0 challenge. Although many participants had implemented a working model of their final projects, we ultimately decided to stick to fleshing out a high-fidelity prototype, since our focus was usability.

The primary functions of Ember are as follows:

1. Citizen reports of real-time wildfires via different mediums (photo/video/audio/text submissions)
2. Location tracking (GPS, media geotags)
3. Connectivity with emergency authorities and locals

Since the app is designed for live reports, it is our intention for the servers to be synced to emergency services around BC. Users' location data are automatically submitted to speed up response time. The purpose of having a dedicated platform that integrates emergency reports with citizen journalism is to spread the news quicker and streamline the process of alerting residents within the area.