An air quality assistant for five boroughs
A public air-quality service for five London boroughs
Residents can find out what the air where they live means for them, and what to do about it. The answers come from readings the boroughs already publish, and the residents who use the service helped design it.
Overview
The London Borough of Hackney issued the tender on behalf of a four-borough partnership with the City of London, Tower Hamlets and Newham. All four boroughs published real-time particulate and nitrogen dioxide readings that regularly passed the levels the boroughs are meant to keep them under, but the numbers sat in technical reports and government databases. The partnership wanted a web tool residents would come back to, on an old phone and in their own language, to raise awareness of air quality where high pollution and high deprivation overlap. Global Action Plan came in as the behaviour-change and user-research partner.
OpenKit won the tender, designed the service with residents and launched it across all four boroughs. The conversational assistant was added to the web tool later.
5m 02s
Average resident session on the assistant, against a sixteen-second baseline for a government web page.
7,000+
Active users across the boroughs.
5
London boroughs running the service.
97.1%
Average scroll depth, measured in OpenKit’s own analytics over three weeks.
Approach
What OpenKit built
Air Aware is a free public web tool with six parts.
- One interactive map that brings several sensor networks together.
- An impact calculator.
- A curated resource library.
- A community hub.
- The conversational assistant.
- A publishing workspace for each borough.
Plain answers about the air where you live
A resident who asks when pollution is lowest near them, or how the air changed over Christmas in Newham, gets a plain answer that says what to do about it. The assistant reads only from sources the boroughs approved.
Every answer shows what it read
A question about next week gets a Defra forecast table and a plain explanation of what the index number means for going outside, with the sources underneath. A note under every reply says the assistant can get things wrong.
Health guidance matched to the person asking
The information hub carries exposure and health guidance from Defra, the NHS and peer-reviewed research, rewritten in plain language. The same reading means one thing for someone with asthma and another for a parent deciding on the school run.
Council action alongside the readings
Borough-curated events and local air-quality news sit next to the data, so a resident who checks a reading also sees what the council is doing about it.
Councils publish without asking an engineer
Each borough’s communications and public-health teams write, edit and schedule what residents see from their own workspace, so an officer can put an update out the same morning a reading changes.
Co-design
Designed with residents in eight workshops
The first prototype was made for people with limited digital literacy and no prior knowledge of air quality. Eight workshops, one in person and one online in each of the four boroughs, gathered feedback from more than a hundred community members. The same residents tested an early version, which focus groups in each borough refined before the launch.
Residents set the accessibility requirements in those sessions: WCAG 2.1 with text alternatives, audio descriptions and keyboard navigation, plus an audio version and multilingual support.
Result
How the service has grown since launch
Physical screens followed in public locations and in Newham pharmacies, so the same content reached people on the high street.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea joined Air Aware in 2026. The council’s own air quality monitoring pages now point residents at Air Aware for the borough’s real-time readings, drawn from more than a hundred monitoring locations across Kensington, Notting Hill, Earl’s Court and Chelsea.
Assurance
Certifications and controls
OpenKit certifications
- ISO 27001
- ISO 9001, UKAS-accredited
- Cyber Essentials
Controls on this project
- UK GDPR
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- UK data residency
Voice
What the councils said
From the outset, their team demonstrated a clear understanding of the brief which required a bespoke solution to be designed incorporating the different requests from a variety of stakeholders. Throughout the project, OpenKit's team remained focused on our objectives and was able to consistently prioritise the needs of our communities. Their thoughtful approach, combined with meticulous attention to detail, made working with them not only effective but also a genuine pleasure.
OpenKit developed an impressive AI assistant, providing an engaging and informative way for our residents to understand air pollution. The tool's user-friendly interface and interactive features have made it easy for people to access the information they need. Despite the challenges faced during the project, OpenKit managed to deliver a product that exceeded our expectations.
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