The story behind the Air Quality Sensory by studio LUFF
As a designer, I’ve always believed in the power of thoughtful creation — crafting objects that not only look beautiful but serve a purpose greater than themselves. While I imagined and built many products for clients and companies, this is the first project, involving hardware and software, that is crafted with my full creative control. I believe that every artifact embodies the ideology of the creator. So, the Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF, just launched on kickstarter, is more than just a utilitarian object, and is more than just a beautiful execution.
With my partner Zaza Zuilhof, we drafted a set of principles for sustainable computing, and we promised to base our practice on exploring better ways of creating objects.
As an independent creator, the Air Quality Sensor project allowed me to sketch what it would take to embrace the principles of minimizing materials, striving for longevity, cultivating understanding, and inspiring tinkering, that Zaza and I outlined in our “Six Principles for Sustainable Computing.” This is a first step into that direction, we have not reached the destination, but rather, just started the journey.
I-80 near the Berkeley water front. Major traffic artery in the San Francsisco Bay Area.
Air Pollution
Let’s talk about air pollution. The air we breathe is essential to our well-being (more on the WHO website), yet many of us remain unaware of the invisible particles and pollutants that lurk in our environments. While outdoor air quality monitoring is becoming more widespread, the truth is that air quality is a hyper-localized problem and can vary significantly from block to block, home to home, and even room to room. This localized nature of air pollution makes it challenging to gauge the quality of the air we actually breathe.
Images from the wildfires in California.
In order to understand the impact of air pollution on our personal health, we need to be informed about the air we breathe within the confines of our own living spaces. Regardless of where we live, given that it affects people living anywhere, from urban environments to the countryside, and can be caused by different sources, from macro, like wildfires or industrial pollution, to micro, like cooking, barbecuing, or using a fireplace.
I believe that technology should give us superpowers, help us see what we cannot, making the invisible visible, and with this conviction, I believe that having an air quality monitor is beneficial, if not essential, for our health and understanding of our environment, and is worth creating.
The first question I always ask myself is, “Is this worth building?” And if so, “Is it worth building for others as well?”
Quiet technology
Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF
The Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF embodies the concept of “quiet technology” — technology that seamlessly integrates into our living spaces without demanding constant attention or disrupting our daily lives. It provides an informative and visually appealing way to monitor the air in the home without relying on obtrusive screens.
The LED dial, reflected on the wall, displays the current air quality level through a circular visualization based on the AQI (Air Quality Index) scale. The pattern on the sensor itself evokes the idea of suspended particulate matter, reminding us of the invisible particles we’re measuring. This graphic was crafted with programmatic coding practices.
Interaction with the sensor is equally unobtrusive. A simple tap on the center button reveals the current air quality reading, while a gentle animation notifies you if levels rise above moderate on the AQI scale. There are no loud notifications. Purposefully the Air Quality Sensor is a diagnostic tool and not an oracle, providing data and insights that allow you to take action and investigate the cause.
Minimize Materials
I’ve always been fascinated by constraints and getting the most out of minimal material and energy use. In a world dominated by headlines pointing to the climate crisis and its consequences, the best approach to creating anything is to minimize the input of materials needed. For that reason, we diverted away from our initial prototypes that would have required a case (most probably made out of plastic), and instead opted for a design using only a printed circuit board and a sensor module.
This approach makes the highly accurate PMS 7003 sensor module accessible to a wider audience at a price point that is hard to find in other commercial products. As you can read in this article from Nature, studies confirm the PMS 7003’s reliability as one of the best sensor modules for accurate reading of air pollution over time.
Strive for Longevity
Another point of reflection is the increasing reliance of hardware products on cloud services. Some hardware products are only the “front end” of cloud services, and when the cloud service stops working, the hardware product loses a lot of its functionalities or stops working altogether. This has been an example of many products, like jibo, pebble or revolv for instance.
The philosophy behind the Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF is “local first.” This approach ensures that the device’s functionalities are resilient and future-proof, prioritizing local data storage and offline capabilities over reliance on cloud services. Without an internet connection, the sensor will continue to operate, storing air quality data locally on the onboard SD card; a safeguard for privacy and longevity. Moreover, a web interface accessible directly from the sensor over the local WiFi network allows access to historical air quality and real time data, without the need for external servers.
With its open hardware architecture, our sensor can also be easily repaired. In fact swapping a malfunctioning sensor module is pretty effortless, and it allows for easy debugging and replacement of components, if they would ever stop working in the future.
Cultivate Understanding
The device, by nature of its minimalism, is intelligible. The components on the back of the sensor are easily accessible and visible to an end-user who is interested in customizing their hardware.
Another aspect, that depends on shying away from cloud computing, is that by not relying on servers the software is all self contained. This means that it is easier to have a full picture of the functioning of the sensor. An additional benefit is much lower power consumption. First of all the use of embedded software written primarily in C and C++ is more efficient than a web-based software stack (link). The concept of the cloud makes computing immaterial, yet, the data centers that power everything we consume online account for large electricity usage, they occupy land, use a lot of water, they have a large carbon footprint and generate a lot of e-waste.
We didn’t want to adhere to any of these dynamics, so we designed the air quality sensor, as explained before, to be able to store the historical data locally, on the on-board SD card, and serve the data over the local network on its own web page; we also share the code with users, for their understanding.
Inspire tinkering
The software architecture that we conceived allows customization at many different levels. The webpage that is served over the local network is stored on the SD card and can be easily customized and improved.
The behavior of the device can be personalized even further by changing the code on the microcontroller that powers the device’s intelligence. Using an ESP32-S3, new software can be uploaded by connecting to a laptop and uploading the code with Arduino.
The Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF is Arduino compatible
The Air Quality Sensor by studio LUFF is a passion project that embodies a lot of the principles that we would like to see in technological products. By adhering to the principles of striving for longevity, cultivating understanding, minimizing materials and inspiring tinkering, our device tries to show a different approach to building things.
Through its thoughtful design and localized data storage, the Air Quality Sensor empowers individuals to take control of the invisible factors impacting their health and well-being. It serves as an example that well designed technology can be beautiful yet last long, insightful yet customizable, but most importantly this project wants to be a catalyst for starting a wider conversation about how we can create better products.
Thank you for reading.
If you are interested in supporting the project or just learn more check out the product page.
An exercise in building better. was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
