LATTICE
Can an institution see its own carbon at the human level, without anyone filling in a form?
- Domain
- Carbon · higher education
- Method
- Administrative data · modelling
- Artefact
- Data pipeline · carbon platform
- Status
- Funded programme · 2026
Every university course has a carbon footprint — the flights that bring students in, the buildings kept warm for them, the servers and labs and libraries. Thousands of tonnes. Until recently, nobody could see any of it.
Could you estimate a course's footprint without asking anyone to fill in a survey? The data already existed — travel records, timetables, estates databases — it just lived in systems that had never been asked to talk to each other.
Administrative data as the primary material. A data pipeline, a modelling algorithm, and a design system that makes an institution's own numbers legible to the people who run it.
LATTICE — a platform that shows a department one clear picture of its carbon footprint, drawn from existing records, with no new data collection required.
In 2026 LATTICE became a funded programme under a Van Houten Fund grant. Two Oxford departments signed letters of intent before the platform was finished, because the picture it offered was one they had never been able to see.
Early versions that were killed — the self-report survey approach (survey fatigue is how sustainability tools die) and a numbers-heavy dashboard that overwhelmed people. Every iteration was a brief to an AI-assisted build, tested and rebuilt; the sketching happened in prompts.