Environment and Climate
A polar bear air monitor for homes in Greenland
Alex Whitaker is designing the Venti-Bear, a home air-quality monitor for Greenland that would feed real-time data back to the companies that design the houses, closing what he calls an information gap between designers and the people who live in them.
In Greenland, by his account, 11% of houses were uninhabitable as of 2023. Alex Whitaker works for a Danish engineering consultancy whose design solutions, he says, are put in place "in the far flung corners of the globe", and the Arctic, specifically Greenland, is one of those regions. The built environment there, he says, is largely designed and maintained by Danish companies. He has recognised an information gap between the people who design houses in Greenland and the people who live in them, and he confirmed it with people from the region.
He sees the problem as two fold.
“real time data from houses is not being fed back to designers”
Alex Whitaker
His answer to that first part is the Venti-Bear, a visual feedback monitor for Greenlandic homes. It is a set of meters and telemetry that measure and record real-time air quality data and show it as "an easy happy, neutral, or sad display on our polar bear inspired unit." The idea, he says, exists cleanly in the format of the Danish COVID Canary. Where he hopes to make a change is the business model: selling the data on to building companies and designers. "Data that can inform better designs, that don’t suffer from the same problems re mould and damp," he says.
The second, larger problem he describes is that education in building services, architecture and civil engineering is not readily attainable to a demographic of largely fishing villages. Because the metering itself sits in local homes, he sees an opportunity to engage local people and teach those interested skills in MEP engineering, maintenance and construction.
Climate is part of it too. The Arctic, he says, is heating up four times faster than the rest of the world. "This landscape of the historically very dry air is getting more and more damp," he says, and that will only worsen the existing problems of ill-fitting ventilation systems.
The Venti-Bear is still a design. The next step, he says, is first prototyping, then a move towards pilot-level installation.