Copenhagen, Denmark

Better air is ‘one chirp’ away with indoor climate sensor AirBird®, thanks to a collaboration between VELUX Group, Leapcraft ApS and 3XN/GXN. AirBird® gives indoor air quality a shape and makes it tangible and actionable.

It measures CO2, temperature and humidity every few minutes and uses this real-time data to prompt action, when needed, to improve air quality and thereby the health and well-being of people in indoor environments.

“Remembering to ‘clear the air’ has never been easier when AirBird® is in a room with you. This clever indoor climate sensor gives a shape and sound to something invisible and yet so important for our health and well-being,” says Steen Sørensen Koch, VP Marketing, the VELUX Group.

The unctionality and design of AirBird® are inspired by canaries used years ago in coal mines to alert miners of toxic gas leaks. With AirBird®, when carbon dioxide levels are too high, an algorithm activates the sound of a bird chirping and a small light flashing.

This indicates that it is time to react to poor air quality by opening windows, activating other forms of ventilation, or moving to another indoor space.

Today we spend up to 90 percent of our time indoors, so monitoring indoor air and taking steps to improve it is important for our health and well-being. Research shows that controlling pollutant concentrations indoors can improve the performance of office workers, make learning and teaching easier for students and teachers, respectively, improve sleep and decrease the risk of asthma and allergies.

“We spend 90 per cent of our time indoors, where we learn, work and live together,” said GXN architect and partner Lasse Lind.

“Often, indoor pollution affects us over a long period of time, so we don’t necessarily detect the changes that happen to our wellbeing such as tiredness and a lack of concentration,” he continued.

“Indoor climate is such a key factor in our lives but it’s a tricky matter. It is quite literally the air that surrounds us. So, we wanted to make the air around us visible and allow people to act and ensure better air quality for themselves and their families.”

AirBird® has been throughly tested for more than one year in a Danish public school in Kokkedal, north of Copenhagen. VELUX Group and Leapcraft have been working with the local Municipality of Fredensborg to monitor the school’s indoor conditions ahead of a municipal renovation project to create the best learning environments in Denmark. See more about the monitoring results in this report.

AirBird® combines design skills from GXN (part of 3XN), sensor and hardware expertise from Leapcraft, plus healthy indoor environment knowledge from VELUX Group. Together, they ideated, co-created, developed, tested and started production of the sensor.

The aim was to make clean air more accessible by helping people to easily understand its importance and to nudge behavioural change.

Architects: 3XN/GXN Innovation
Manufacturers: Leapcraft ApS and VELUX A/S