WILO

A System Design for Urban Willow-Based Oil Spill Response
WILO is an urban sustainability decision system designed to support oil spill response by transforming seasonal willow floss—an overlooked urban waste—into a distributed environmental resource.
Current oil spill cleanup relies heavily on toxic chemical dispersants and slow labor-intensive processes, often resulting in secondary pollution. Simultaneously, cities spend millions managing willow floss as a nuisance waste, ignoring its superior hydrophobic and oil-absorbing structure. WILO bridges these silos through a city-scale framework that operationalizes the entire material lifecycle—from seasonal collection and compression into modular booms, to distributed storage and emergency deployment.
The system integrates urban data, environmental alerts, and material logistics into a unified decision-support structure. AI is used as a synthesis layer to aggregate information, model risk trends, and visualize potential consequences, enabling stakeholders to understand when, where, and how willow-based resources can be deployed effectively. Importantly, AI does not make decisions; it supports human judgment by clarifying options and trade-offs.
Tailored UX interfaces serve as the primary human entry point to WILO, translating complex system states into accessible insights for diverse stakeholders—from municipal workers coordinating seasonal willow floss harvests to emergency commanders deploying resources during spill events. By reframing oil spill response not as a single-product fix but as a circular, systemic design challenge, WILO demonstrates how an overlooked urban burden can be transformed into a distributed, frontline ecological defense—aligning waste, risk, and decision-making into a sustainable closed-loop system.