Introducing Makerversity x Kickstarter Resident, So-Ra

Makerversity x Kickstarter Residency

Supporting makers has always been at the heart of what we do. This year, we launched a brand new residency in partnership with Kickstarter for a young creative business to launch a new project around the theme of sustainable design. Read more about it here.

 

So-Ra

Kicking off this July, our first Kickstarter Resident is SO-RA. SO-RA is an air quality sensing and visualisation unit that enables people to understand how their building breathes and forecasts the indoor air quality. SO-RA suggests an energy efficient solution for users to improve indoor air quality.

SO-RA was founded by RCA graduates Yoo-Jin and Yuki.

 

– What is your current mission?

We are looking into creating a global impact in home health and well-being through monitoring indoor air quality, initially targeting parents of young children. Children are vulnerable to air quality pollution because their immune system and lungs are still developing. WHO notes that air quality is one of the leading causes of non-communicable disease (such as lung-disease, heart attack, pulmonary diseases). We want to disrupt the air quality monitoring market, as it is currently not doing enough to educate people to manage their relationship with the air they breathe, as we can see from continued reports on hospitalisation in more and more polluted urban environments.

 

– Why is this mission important now?

Many people are not aware of the health impacts of air pollution. Actually Indoor air quality is 5 times worse than outdoor air quality. Globally, 4.2 million deaths are linked to air pollution. This is 3 times more deaths than those caused by car accidents. We want to empower people to control their indoor air quality to improve long term health benefits.

 

– How does your project fit into the theme of Sustainable Design?

We are using biodegradable plastic as a sustainable design solution. Also using additive manufacturing process to control the quality. We try to achieve using sustainable material for consumer electronics.

 

 

– What inspires you?

Visualisation of airflow is a commercial opportunity because people are not able to understand the importance of it in their daily lives, and it is not communicated in an easy way that is consumable. It is an emerging area that will be of ever greater importance as we are able to understand our health and environment.

 

– Why do you make?

The last few years innovations have been focused on collecting data in the domain of airflow and its visualisation. Our experience and current trends in smart products have created an opportunity for a product to be developed that harnesses these breakthroughs. This is creating a new market of technologies that are both human-centric and data enabled. It is not limited to air quality, but that is an area that I have studied in great detail, and believe is of significance.

Our experience as makers brings together many of the current and future trends that are emerging in technology and hardware, so it is a great time for us to start a startup, particularly as we already have experience bringing consumer electronics to market.

 

 

– What are you hoping to achieve through this residency?

We’re here today in the hopes that we can work with a Kickstarter campaign to bring our project to the next level. With the funding we’d like to finalise our design for production and work with users to develop our mobile application.