2025
AI
IoT
Aircle
Role
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Team
Fiona Faubert
Duration
March to April 2025
Skills
Product Design
User Research
Prototyping
Overview
What if we turned invisible environmental data into a compass for urban health?
Urban air quality is a complex, invisible, and constantly fluctuating problem. Aircle is an IoT-driven companion app designed to bridge the gap between technical environmental metrics and real-world human behaviour.
Problem
Air quality data is technical, static, and unactionable.
Most urban residents are surrounded by pollution, yet they lack the tools to make informed decisions in real-time. Existing solutions provide "awareness" through complex charts, but fail to provide agency.
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...but it’s not easy to navigate when you don’t own the air!
Operating in an urban environment means dealing with invisible hazards that change by the minute. Most users find technical AQI scores hard to interpret, making it nearly impossible to trust their surroundings or know how to respond.
Solution
Aircle: The IoT companion that guides you toward cleaner air.
For seniors with early dementia, it’s a loss of independence and safety. Existing solutions are either too complex for cognitive decline to provide real-time visibility for caregivers, leaving both parties in a state of constant anxiety.
Core Flows
At-a-Glance Air Quality
Bubbles visualize pollution intensity instantly, replacing technical jargon with a "plain language" interface.
Navigating to Better Air
The system guides you toward cleaner zones while allowing them to report pollution sources, turning awareness into action.
Follow the Clean Air
Air quality improves visually as users move, guiding them intuitively without relying on text or charts.
Understanding Your Exposure
A reflective view that helps users understand when and why their exposure changed, turning raw data into personal insights.
Design Decisions
We identified the most intuitive way to showcase
With insights from dementia-friendly design principles, we prioritized voice commands, large touch targets, and single-accent dashboards.
Reflection
What it taught me
Think in systems
Aircle taught me that an IoT product is a continuous conversation between the user, the hardware, and the environment.
The simplest designs hold a lot of complexity
My job as a designer is to explore the complexity of environmental science and bring simplicity to the urban resident. Elegant solutions require a lot of exploration and iteration.