The aim of our project was to collaborate with young children for educational, co-design and co-creation purposes while making an Air Quality Monitoring Station and developing children’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) skills.

Alexandra Pazos (age 8) and Helena Pazos (age 7) were invited to our ideation working sessions of our Air quality monitoring. They were aware of the impacts of polluted air in human’s health and planetary ecosystems, so they purposed to use a chameleon to check the Air Quality. They wanted to use his/her superpowers and abilities of changing colors to let him/her tell us if the air was clean and healthful or not. They baptized the chameleon Pascal.

As designers we guided them trough the designing process, from drawing sketches, plans, views, and perspectives, building the playdough’s models, 3D scanning (Qlone), sculpting and 3d modeling (Autodesk Meshmixer) to 3d printing (Cura).

The network communication for big data storage from sensors located and designed in daily and advanced products, are what the industry called: the internet of things. Pascal the chameleon for example could sense the different particles in air and give a status of the quality and send that information to a microcontroller programmed to turn on the Neopixel strip. This information from Pascal can be deployed on a platform and give statistics about the quality of the air in different areas, such as indoor and outdoor spaces. Another example of the air quality reading is the Smart Citizen project which is a great inspiration in most of the work developed during the master.

Another important aspect of this project was the co-design process done by the young sisters Elena and Alexandra Pazos, that design and construct Pascal from plaster and then 3d scanned and printed.

Team: Verónica Agreda, Clemént Rames and Francisco Flores.