Aclima - Creating Collective Eco-Intelligence (UPDATED)

By Ashley Thorfinnson
"The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow."

- Buckminster Fuller, 1983

Using air monitors to create ecological transparency, BFI Challenge Semi-Finalist Aclima is educating children and adults alike in how our individual actions can affect and transform the world we live in. By bringing air quality statistics to life through social networking interfaces like facebook and twitter, they are connecting data, ideas and people. The creation of online "neighborhoods" makes it is easy for people to see how individual remedies can scale up to have a global impact. Through the creation of online connections and correlations across the globe, Aclima will encourage systems thinking and reinforce the interrelatedness of every person and place on "spaceship earth".

Recognizing that much of the information about global warming feels either too broad or too unbelievable to act upon, Aclima has found a way to empower individuals to create small, measurable instances of bottom-up change - as opposed to the current efforts of slow, top-down, governmental actions. Aclima operates on the idea that individuals have the ability to best perceive the changes that need to happen in their own lives, and that the aggregate benefits of many small targeted improvements can outweigh the benefits of bigger, broad-brush solutions. For instance, in a project at Manual Arts High School in south Los Angeles, students used Aclima's unique, affordable air pollution monitors called "pufftrons" to take air quality measurements of their classrooms and the community around them. By dispersing the monitors around their school and observing the recorded air quality data, the students noticed that carbon dioxide levels in their classroom were exceeding 4,000 ppm when standard levels should be around 300 ppm. At that high of a level of carbon dioxide, students were feeling sleepy or getting headaches. The students took action by adding plants to the classroom and opening the windows at certain times of the day. This project showed that through the use of the monitors and understanding its data, students were educated and empowered to make changes for their own health in their day-to-day lives.

[Students in Switzerland associate live air quality data with the usage of nail polish, illustrating the power of radical transparency of information.]

The air pollution monitors are designed by Aclima to be universally accessible. Aclima wants to make the monitors broadly compatible and easily affordable, and these attributes are reflected in the design of the monitors, as well as the overall system. Aclimaʼs proof-of-concept monitors, called "pufftrons," were painted to look like a cloud-shaped cartoon character with 25 eyes, which indicate the levels of pollution in temperature, sound, Carbon Dioxide and VOCs. The design relies on visuals, not words, so that it is easily understood and used by people of any age or language. Real time data that is relayed from the sensors to the website is recorded and displayed in layers that increase in complexity and detail depending on how much information the user wants.

Aclimaʼs portfolio of patent pending technologies includes stationary, wireless, outdoor and mobile monitors. The company is now working on next-generation designs of its monitors across all of these applications. As one example, all of Aclimaʼs devices can now sense an expanded range of variables, including NO2. And its mobile personal monitors, which can be handheld or wearable, are now also being developed for direct attachment to cell-phones. These personal monitors, which run on Aclimaʼs patent pending “Squirrel+Acorn” platform, can relay data directly to a users cell-phone where it is visualized. Aclima is also leveraging iPhone and Android apps, web-interfaces, and a variety of strategies to create communities around these devices. A number of beta-deployments are currently in progress around the world.

As part of its mission, Aclima is also working to bring its technologies and tools into the educational field. The company has launched the “Aclima Participatory Learning Lab” to focus exclusively on formal and informal learning applications. The goal of the Learning Lab is to make environmental quality meaningful to elementary, middle and high school students. Based on its proof-of-concept project, Black Cloud, the Aclima Participatory Learning Lab is developing a kit which will be offered to middle and high schools. The kit helps advance the ecoliteracy skills that will prepare students to address the natural resource challenges of our era.

Aclima exemplifies the power that can come from recognizing and changing our individual, designed actions. As the team explained in their interview, "There are three things that go into our bodies: food, water and air. We take 26,000 breaths a day, but we don't have a conscious relationship with that aspect of existence. We're not always thinking about what we're doing to the environment and the collective health of the species. Through empowerment with air quality data, we are able to break that veil."

Video-Black Cloud