.MAESTRO
PUBLIC SAFETY COMMAND CENTER

One operational picture of everything moving in the city.

Maestro is a geospatial situational awareness platform for the operations center of Piauí's Public Security Department (SSP-PI). It fuses vehicles, cameras, incidents and live events onto a single real-time map — so operators grasp the whole surroundings at a glance. Awareness is the product; every decision stays with the human operator.

ROLELead Product Designer
TIMELINE3 months
TEAMVopi Tech · 6 people
PLATFORMWeb · Command Center
.overview
The problem

A command center runs on a dozen disconnected tools — radio, camera walls, vehicle trackers, spreadsheets, incident logs. Operators burn precious seconds stitching a mental picture of what is happening and where, at the exact moment when seconds decide the outcome.

How might we give an operations team one trustworthy, real-time picture of the field — so they understand any situation instantly and coordinate the response with confidence?

Our solution

Maestro unifies every operational signal — viaturas, câmeras, ocorrências, zonas — on one live geospatial map, with a running event feed, priority triage and one-click dispatch. It makes the whole territory legible in a single glance. It shows what is happening; the operator decides what to do.

See everything. Miss nothing. Decide as a human. Maestro turns scattered signals into a single, calm operational picture.

.research

I studied how the SSP-PI operations center actually works — shadowing operators, mapping their tools and how they decide under pressure. The pattern was clear: the information already exists, but it is fragmented, and fragmentation costs time.

12+tools an operator juggles across a single shift
24/7continuous operation that can never go dark
< 10starget time to locate any unit or incident on the map
1shared operational picture for the whole room
Key findings
01

The picture lived in operators' heads

Situational awareness was rebuilt by hand from radio chatter and several screens. It was slow, fragile and nearly impossible to hand off cleanly between shifts.

02

Fragmentation was the real bottleneck

No single tool showed vehicles, cameras and incidents together on a map. Correlating them manually added delay to every single response.

03

Trust needs the human in the loop

Operators rightly distrust systems that decide for them. Any tool had to inform and empower judgment — never automate the call.

Design decisions derived from research
Research insight
Design decision
Information is fragmented across tools
One unified real-time map
Seconds decide outcomes
Live event feed + instant locate
Shifts must hand off cleanly
A persistent, shared operational picture
Operators must stay in control
Awareness only — dispatch is one deliberate click
The room decides together
A single source of truth on the video wall
Why this matters

Maestro is not a decision engine — it is a clarity engine. By making the whole field legible at a glance, it frees skilled operators to do what only humans can: judge, prioritize and act.

.audience

Maestro serves the whole chain of a security operation. Four roles touch the same picture — from the operator watching the wall to the manager reading the reports.

Monitoring Operator
Primary user

Works 6-hour shifts at the video wall, watching the map and the live feed, triaging incidents and dispatching the nearest unit.

Goals
  • See the whole territory at a glance
  • Locate any unit or incident instantly
  • Dispatch fast, without leaving the map
Pain Points
  • Too many disconnected tools
  • Alert fatigue from noisy channels
  • Losing the picture between shifts
Shift Supervisor
Coordinator

Owns priorities, escalation and response times across a room of operators throughout the shift.

Goals
  • Keep the whole room aligned
  • Escalate the right things, fast
  • Report the shift with confidence
Pain Points
  • No consolidated view of the room
  • Hard to prove response times
  • Manual, error-prone hand-offs
Field Commander
On the ground

Leads units in the field and needs the center's picture pushed to them in real time.

Goals
  • Know exactly what the center sees
  • Coordinate with units nearby
  • Move with full situational context
Pain Points
  • Relies on radio relays
  • Blind to the wider situation
  • Delayed, second-hand information
SSP Manager
Accountability

Answers for coverage, outcomes and resources to public-security leadership.

Goals
  • Understand coverage and gaps
  • Reliable reports for leadership
  • Data to guide resourcing
Pain Points
  • Fragmented, unreliable data
  • No trustworthy operational history
  • Decisions made without evidence
.goals
1

One glance, whole picture

Understand any situation in seconds, not minutes — the field legible at a single look.

2

Real-time & reliable

Live data that never goes stale or down. In a command center, trust is the feature.

3

Awareness, not automation

Empower the operator's judgment; keep every operational decision in human hands.

4

Calm under pressure

A clear, legible interface that stays readable and quiet in the middle of a crisis.

.core features

Four capabilities turn scattered signals into one operational picture — every one designed to inform the operator, never to replace their judgment.

Feature 1

Live geospatial map

Every unit, camera, incident and zone on one real-time map. Layered, filterable and always current — the single place where the whole situation lives.

  • Live positions for every viatura and camera
  • Incidents and critical zones shown in context
  • Pan, zoom and locate in under a second
Feature 2

Event feed & priority triage

A running stream of everything happening, ranked by priority — crítica, alta, média, baixa — so the important never hides behind the noisy.

  • Real-time incident and system feed
  • Priority triage built into every event
  • Confirm and act without losing context
Feature 3

Unit tracking & dispatch

See each unit's status, route and ETA. When it is time to respond, the operator dispatches the nearest one with a single, deliberate click.

  • Status and route for every unit
  • Nearest-unit dispatch, in context
  • Dispatch is explicit — never automated
Feature 4

Layers & filters

Toggle cameras, incidents, critical zones, coverage and territorial divisions. Focus the map on exactly what the moment demands.

  • Composable, toggleable map layers
  • Filter by priority and by type
  • Tailor the view per operator or per crisis
.screens

The command screen — one legible surface where the whole operation lives: layers and filters on the left, the live territory in the center, alerts, feed and unit detail on the right.

.learnings

Designing for a command center reframed what good design means. Every decision was, ultimately, about how fast a person understands.

Design for the worst 3 seconds

Under pressure, clarity beats features. Every element had to earn its place on the wall — if it didn't speed understanding, it was noise.

Awareness is a stance, not a feature

Keeping decisions human shaped every interaction: dispatch is deliberate, alerts inform, and nothing is ever automated on the operator's behalf.

The room is the user

Designing for a shared video wall is different from designing for one screen. Legibility at a distance drove the type, colour and hierarchy of the whole system.

In a command center, the interface disappears when it works. The measure of Maestro isn't how much it shows — it's how fast an operator understands.

.impact

Maestro was delivered as the situational-awareness layer for SSP-PI's operations center, built on a scalable, fully-tokenized design system.

359design tokens powering the whole system
370+component variants in the Figma library
7core operator flows mapped end-to-end
1unified picture for the entire room

Cockpit / blueprint design language — near-black surfaces, signal orange and IBM Plex — tuned for legibility on the command-center video wall.

Let's design clearer systems together.

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©2026 Iana Fonteneles – All Rights Reserved Available for freelance work