Air Aware. A public air-quality service for five London boroughs
Free to use with no sign-up, designed with the residents it was written for and grounded in the boroughs’ own published data.
5m 02s average session 16 sec reported baseline 7,000+ residents
A four-borough tender for an air-quality service.
The London Borough of Hackney issued the tender on behalf of a four-borough partnership with the City of London, Tower Hamlets and Newham, for a web tool raising air-quality awareness in the places where high pollution and high deprivation overlap. Reporting had to line up with Defra’s quarterly requirements, and Global Action Plan came in as the behaviour-change and user-research partner.
OpenKit won the tender and delivered the service, from the first prototype through community co-design to the live launch across all four boroughs. The conversational assistant came later, sitting on top of the web tool and drawing live readings from several sensor networks alongside health information from published sources. Physical screens followed, in public locations and in Newham pharmacies, so the same content reached people on the high street as well as on their phones.
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More than a hundred community members shaped the service across eight co-design workshops, two in every borough.
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A conversational assistant that answers from the boroughs’ own published data and shows the sources it read.
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WCAG 2.1 with an audio version and multilingual support, because the audience was the one most air-quality work misses.
Public readings that nobody could act on.
All four boroughs published real-time particulate and nitrogen dioxide readings, and those readings regularly passed the levels the boroughs are meant to keep them under. The numbers sat in technical reports and government databases. The project reported against a sixteen-second baseline for a government web page, which is not enough time to turn an index reading into a decision about the school run or the afternoon in the park. The partnership wanted a service residents would come back to:
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One front door residents would actually use, on an old phone, in their own language, with no sign-up.
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Advice that changed with the person asking, because a nursery manager and a runner need different answers from the same reading.
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A clear step from a bad reading to something a resident could do about it that afternoon.
Designed with residents, across eight workshops.
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A first prototype for low digital literacy
The first thing put in front of residents was deliberately made for people with limited digital literacy and no prior knowledge of air quality, because those were the communities the tender was written for.
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Eight workshops, two per borough
One in person and one online in each of the four boroughs, gathering feedback from more than a hundred community members. Figma carried the sessions so residents, borough teams and our own designers worked on the same screens at the same time.
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A pilot the same residents tested
The co-design participants tested the pilot, then per-borough focus groups refined it before the service launched across all four.
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Accessibility agreed in the sessions
WCAG 2.1 with text alternatives, audio descriptions and keyboard navigation, plus an audio version and multilingual support. Residents set those requirements themselves, so they were in the build from the first prototype rather than added in the weeks before launch.
Inside Air Aware.
Air Aware is a free public web tool with a conversational assistant on top of it, consolidating several sensor networks into one interactive map, an impact calculator, a curated resource library and a community hub. The assistant only reads from sources the boroughs approved, every answer comes back in plain language with a citation attached, and each borough reviews its own content before it goes out under the council’s name.
Plain answers about the air where you live
A resident asks when pollution is lowest near them, or how the air changed over Christmas in Newham, and gets an answer in ordinary language with a next step attached. The assistant reads published borough feeds, Defra monitoring and the boroughs’ own public-health guidance, and it does not go out to the open web for anything.
Every answer shows what it read
Ask what next week looks like and the reply comes back as a Defra forecast table, a plain explanation of what the index number means for going outside, and the sources underneath it. A standing note under every reply tells residents the assistant can get things wrong.
Health guidance matched to the person asking
Exposure and health information drawn from Defra, the NHS and peer-reviewed research, rewritten in plain language and translated to match each borough’s own communications. 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 alongside the data, so a resident who checks a reading also sees what the council is doing about it and what is happening near them that week.
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. The workspace is scoped per borough, which keeps every piece of content attributable to the council that published it.
What the boroughs got back.
average resident session on the assistant, against the sixteen-second baseline the project reported against.
average scroll depth, from our own analytics over a three-week measurement window.
residents using a free service, on an old phone if that is what they have.
London boroughs running it: Hackney, City of London, Tower Hamlets, Newham and, since 2026, Kensington and Chelsea.
2026: a fifth borough joins.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea joined Air Aware in 2026, bringing the service to five London boroughs. The council’s own air quality monitoring pages now point residents at Air Aware for the borough’s real-time readings, drawn from a network of more than a hundred monitoring locations across Kensington, Notting Hill, Earl’s Court and Chelsea.
The build
- Conversational AI assistant
- Real-time air quality APIs
- Defra monitoring integration
- Public web app
- Multilingual content layer
OpenKit certifications
- ISO 27001
- ISO 9001, UKAS-accredited
- Cyber Essentials
Controls on this project
- UK GDPR
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- UK data residency
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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