Water Beacon

Water Beacon Concept Sketch/Blueprint

Creative Brief

Crafted Product

We do not yet have a crafted product. But we do have a lot of work-in-progress. The idea is to complete a simpler phase first, a water quality reporting app. The more challenging phases would come later, with a homemade water quality sensor kit paired with a grassroots reporting app.

Goal

🚰

Water Beacon's long-term goal is to develop a platform that communicates what's in your drinking water. We're able to visualize the weather and air quality this way. We believe visualizing water quality is the next frontier.

Phase 1: A news aggregator app to see water quality warnings near you, working with public data.
Phase 2: A water quality sensor display, presented in app form, which 6th Graders can read and share.
Phase 3: A Do-it-Yourself Kit with educational materials to make your own sensors, and get a response back from the app.
Create a UX design that's playful, intuitive, and rewarding.

Role

📍

Water Beacon is an experimental project designed and developed by Moses McCall, a former NASA computer engineer, me, and Aaron Nelson, a SUNY New Paltz Professor of Digital Design and Fabrication who made some compelling 3D models of a solar-charged water quality testing buoy

Process

Discovery

Observations

👀

Water quality visualizations are challenging to read and interpret for those unfamiliar with the metrics and visual language of these charts.

The challenge: Typically, water quality data is displayed like this:

👂

I've asked a lot of people about this: People are actually scared of what's in their water. Scientific measurements also can be intimidating and abstract. Listening to these comments, I thought it would be best to make the interface warm and friendly.

📊

This project is informed by data.

Data

Index from USGS:: supplies data across the U.S.
Environmental working group:

Utilities in violation

Warnings from city (like boil)
Add sensor from Dr. Chen (allow for time dimension and lead index)
Create Kit from Robofalcons project (Rohit Bhatia) and dev partnership with them

They test our UX
We make a design kit to spread info about how to be water quality reporters & citizens

We have an index 100 — 0...smiling sea turtle...sad sea turtle...

0-25 :: Very bad /

25-50 :: Bad

50-70 :: Medium

70-90 :: Good

90-100 :: Excellent

On the map, we have a water utility icon for...

Utility
Flood
Do not drink
Boil

Phase 2: Sensor key parameters

Original paper for making low-cost water sensors

The figures and charts on this page are from this paper.

🖍️

The Discovery Sketching began in 2016. The below presentation was about the vision for this project.

2016 Presentation

Moses McCall & Joshua Korenblat

🚰

See your water as you’ve never seen it before. See a dashboard of water quality and flow in your home. See how that compares to your community and greater scales. These results can be seen in an overview map or charts. The user then can make a zoomed view, or filter a view, and access details on-demand. Be part of a community that monitors safe and healthy drinking water for all.

Presentation

Concepts → Blueprint

2018 Ideation

2017 Ideation

Water Beacon 2017

This is still rough, but gets the idea across, I hope. Kind of like Waze/Hello Weather but for water. Basically, users would be able to read data from the USGS and the environmental working group to find out about a water quality index, utilities in violation, and boil water warnings.

Once this round is done, we've been talking to Dr. Junghong Chen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee about including his lead sensor invention, which will add new dimensions to our data.

We are also working with a middle-school robotics team who are our user experience testers. We want to democratize awareness of water quality issues.

It would be great if we could include a report to your community function, or maybe just simple social media sharing.

Here is the key info:

Town Park Proposal

Designs by Allen Ross Architecture

We were invited to display this project in a town park in New Paltz (images from the proposal, below).

📧Emails about Town Park Proposal

We thought we could use a simple interface, such as a set of lights to display colors that show the water quality in the nearby Wallkill River. All we would need is the sensor on the river to measure water quality.

Reflection

💭

Water Beacon needs completion. There’s no barrier, other than time and resources, to complete Phase 1, the prototype for the news aggregator app. Phase 2, the sensor technology, already works but we have a problem keeping these sensors calibrated. This issue would need to be resolved, or the project simplified; for example, instead of testing multiple metrics of water quality, just test pH.