Arnau Donate Duch

Phare is a smoke alarm that uses indoor air quality (IAQ) sensors to better discriminate between fires and nuisances, and provides you with tailored actionable IAQ insights. It brings together the smoke alarm and the air quality monitor into a single device to bring safe, healthy air to your home.

Today’s smoke alarms are inaccurate and inadequate. They miss 43% of fires, have a 75% false alarm rate, and ignore all other pollutants in the air other than smoke.

The last significant improvement in smoke detection technology dates back to 1973. Current photo-electric sensors look for smoke, but most can’t distinguish it from steam, dust, and other harmful particles. This is particularly concerning as we spend 90% of our day indoors, unknowingly breathing air that is 2 to 5 times dirtier than outdoor air.

Phare complements the current optical smoke sensor data with indoor air quality data, looking at the air composition and using machine learning to understand which is the source of the pollutants in it. This allows us to give you tailored actionable insights on what you can do to boost your health, well-being and productivity while keeping you safe.

Know more on pharelabs.com

Clear Card is a design probe, a case study on decolonizing oppresion by design, with design. It is a toolkit for asylum applicants to improve their perceived credibility in the eyes of the UK Home Office and build their personal testimony.

At the end of 2020, there were upwards of 70,000 people navigating the UK’s asylum system. The UK has constructed an application system that is characterised by its hostility towards each individual. Many applications are rejected on the basis of a ‘lack of credibility’, a metric that relies on subjective case-worker’s perception of an applicant.

We designed two tools to tackle two key moments in the application process. The first is a digital platform that allows them to construct and narrate their individual story, and automatize the third party evidence collection to source data to support their testimony with credible evidence.

The second tool is a storytelling aid to help them navigate the substantive interview, which is where the decision to grant or deny the asylum is made. We designed a low-cost, standarized printable document that the asylum seeker can physically bring to the interview which visually cross-references their testimony and all the evidence collected on a timeline of events.

Clear Card was developed in collaboration with Ahad Mahmood and Aura Murillo.

MAREA's experimental techniques challenge the understanding of authorship, and their pieces question the human ownership over nature while vindicating the transience of our existence as a civilization.

"Waves are transient, like our lives. They appear and disappear. Give back what someone throws at them and take away what no one wants them to take. They are as tragic as peaceful. As ephemeral as constant, and as constant as changing."

MAREA is a collective of three artists with cross-disciplinary backgrounds in fine art, design and curation. Their collaborative work is part of the series "Waves Radiography", a portrait of pictographic pieces with marine hues that immortalize a moment that won’t happen ever again. Each of the pieces of this series is unique, and is captured in the northern coastline in Catalonia, in one of the “calas” of the Costa Brava.

Know more on wavesradiography.com

Cala Salionç I will be auctioned at the private view of the RA Summer Exhibition 2022 (20th July)

C-Earth is a participatory system that uses images taken by citizens with their phones to monitor, at a local scale, how the environment changes over time.

A single image doesn't tell us much about climate change, but together with thousands of other images taken in the same spot through time, they allow us to create a live picture of how the environment changed and predict how it will change. This enables the scientific community to fill the gaps that traditional scientific methods like satellite imagery have, supplementing their macro with micro data.

C-Earth aims to leverage the intrinsic value in the 1.4 trillion images that are taken each year with phones. The system is embedded in the phone OS's camera. When the user is in a hotspot of scientific interest, the images taken go through an on-device AI filter that assesses the suitability and usefulness of the image, and then are labelled and uploaded to a global open-source database.

To monitor climate change we need to have real-time, first-hand, abundant information, which can only be achieved with a scalable, effortless solution that benefits from the generalized use of smartphones across the globe.

C-Earth was developed in collaboration with Ilayda Kal and Marco Da Re.