An Ambient Helper
The Ambient One air quality monitor, designed for workshops and studios (image: courtesy of Ambient Works).
Sawdust, silicone, ceramics, spray paint. Workshops are like Aladdin’s cave, if Aladdin's cave were full of carcinogens. “You might be aware of what you’re making and what those materials create in terms of pollution, but you have no idea what the person next to you is doing, and whether they’re also looking at that aspect,” Giulio Ammendola, the co-founder of Ambient Works, tells me.
To address this issue, Ammendola and his fellow co-founder Yuki Machida have set about designing a device to help users understand how to improve the air quality in their workshops and studios, after discovering that health concerns are a common concern amongst designers and makers. Ambient One is an air quality monitor designed to alert makers to the potential pollutants their work may be producing, and give tailored advice on how to minimise this via their user-friendly app. Ambient One is in its early stages of life, and will be launched through Kickstarter on 11 June 2024.
“It’s quite industrial looking,” I say. “Yeah it’s a mix of things,” Ammendola replies. “One thing we realised was that it needed to be pretty small and sturdy to survive the environments it was being put through.” Weighing 300g, Ambient One has an outer shell of milled aluminium, protecting an inner sensor. The device is utilitarian yet playful, with a bright orange handle and simple display face where two blinking eyes greet you when the device is turned on. It’s like something out of WALL-E, I think. “It feels like a bit of fresh air compared to normal smart home devices that often feel like science lab products,” Ammendola says. “We hope that's also the seeds of something we can continue to build upon and make health-related devices that help people, but are also fun to use.”
Image courtesy of Ambient Works.
As well as being rather charming, Ambient One is constantly scanning for the four most common pollutants found in creative spaces. “It tracks particulate matter, NOx [from welding or car engines] , CO2, and VOCs - the gasses in the air,” Ammendola tells me, pointing to the small display screen. All of this data is tracked, logged and presented back to the user on Ambient One’s app via tailored AI-driven tips.
Last year Machida and Ammendola secured a small catalyst fund from Innovative UK, with a proposal explaining how they wanted to improve the wellbeing of creatives in England. “It’s something that is not very well known, but we spend most of our time indoors where air quality can be five times worse than outdoor air,” Ammendola says.
“For example, in ceramic studios, there are silica particles, which people getting into ceramics or pottery might not know about, which can leads to Silicosis [an incurable lung disease],” Machida adds. “We wanted to try and help creatives and makers that are spending all their time in these environments.”
Image courtesy of Ambient Works.
Machida and Ammendola have put Ambient One through an ongoing six-month user testing period, and produced several different prototypes, some looking like a device off the Starship Enterprise, until arriving at the current refined, more compact form. They have given a number of Ambient Ones to designers and makers across London - “We worked with two ceramicists in Camberwell, and it was nice when they suggested ways to use it that we didn’t initially think about,” Ammendola says. “One of the ceramicists was telling us that she now waits before going into the studio, because she realised [the pollution] was still lingering until 10am from the night before. She would not have been able to do [this] before.”
Ambient One is technically still in the testing phase, with many models remaining in the custody of designers and makers who are relaying feedback to Ammendola and Machida. Ammendola laughs about how “the female makers are very responsive to taking care of their health, but the lads, the male workers, are like, No it’s fine, I don’t want to know that kind of thing. But the initial response is pretty interesting.”
Words Ella North