Norway always appears with an impression of a clean, green country. It is a clean country in most of the cases, but there're some non-negligible sign of air pollution within the city areas, such as the subsidence dust caused by cold air and the particles left by wood burning.
With the help from I-Flink, a system utilizes low-cost sensor solutions to develop a geographically distributed network of environmental sensors for Norwegian municipalities, we were able to know the real-time air quality information. The problem that we were facing was how to spread out the information that can benefit the citizens, allow them to react with the real-time information.
To apply the sensors into the final product through design to meet with NILU's requirement, arising people’s awareness of the air pollution problem. And provide users a convenient way to receive air quality information.
Research phase was all about finding the problem areas, sharing the thoughts, understanding the core of existing problem and the using different methods like solution mapping and mind-map to achieve it. At the end of this phase we came up with 3 research questions which represented 3 different direction that we could further research on.
Exploring different thoughts
The methods we used during this phase were help to find the core problems with air pollution. With the problem area settled down, we were able to find solutions, generate new ideas and further develop them. Together with the previous research, we made a 'must, should, could' list as our final design's parameter. We also built ideations and concepts based on the information we had and discussed a lot on their pros and cons. At the end of this phase we were able to filter out 3 concepts for further development.
We condensed our ideations into workable concepts at the beginning and applied different methods to analyze them to see if they suit the requirement. We decided our final direction and generate new concepts based on the old concepts. The step by step process allowed us to sort, to analyze, to evaluate and to reflect every decision we made. The concept was finalized as we kept doing these steps. By the end of this phase we had a solid concept that ready to go into the final deliver stage. And we determined the focus group of this project should be someone who cares about health, environment and the air quality index would have a huge impact on their behavioural rules.
In this phase we were focus on refining our final concept, Air Quality Indicator ("AQ-I" in below text) and finishing the mock-ups, prototypes, and the video for showing how the concept work to our client NILU. We decided to go forward with the idea that cooperated with the city bike system, in which our target group highly overlaps with their user group. AQ-I is a project that NILU design office offered to Norwegian Institute for Air Research focusing on spreading the air pollution information to public. The project is a 3 in 1 project, included 'City Bike App', 'The Bike AQ-I' and 'AQ-I'.
The new City Bike App will show the air quality around the bike stations. Bikers can make their choice on which route should be taken based on the air quality information shown in the app.
The Bike AQ-Indicator is a bulb connected to the bike, receiving information from the nearest sensor while you are biking, the colour will change according to how polluted the air is in that region. The intention of this feature is to make the biker aware of his environment on his daily route or other places he is taking his bike. The vision will be that our user can plan his route based on where the air is cleaner.
The AQ-I is located close to the city-bike racks, and the idea is that the sensor is nearby or a part of our product. It is an installation made for public space, here we focus on creating a shared experience for the community. It is directed more on triggering a reaction from the public, if the air quality is going down.
The city bike app was prototyping on Adobe XD to check the user flow, the bike AQ-I was made in 1:1 scale and the AQ-I stand was made out in 1:4 scale to showcase to out client. We also built a scaled city model to help people understand the usage of the system.
The A-Q-I system with a stop motion animation
We are a team of 11 people, me and 3 other 3rd year students are leaders of the design team. Leader team are mostly in charge of decision making, designing the whole design process from research (define) face to deliver face.
Björn Bruchmann
Fredrik Hope
Ziying (Milk) Fan
Ly Nguyen
Eivind Kolstad
Karina Follo
Jacob E Tangen
Emilie M Sandman
Tobias Paulsen
Martine J Markussen
Kris Søbak