iF Design Award, one of the world’s most renowned design prizes, awards Fybra Home, the intelligent sensor for monitoring and improving indoor air quality. The product, designed by Italian studio 21am for the Milan-based start-up Fybra, won the coveted award in the Product discipline, Home Products category.
The award has been organised every year since 1954 by iF International Forum Design GmbH, the world’s oldest independent design organisation based in Hanover. A 132-member jury of independent experts from all over the world chose Fybra Home from almost 11,000 nominations from 57 countries.
The light system: information and immediacy
Fybra Home was selected because of its sophisticated aesthetics and its ability to convey detailed but essential information in a simple and immediate way. In fact, the device shows the indoor air quality through an essential light system: the blue light indicates good air quality, the red light indicates bad quality and the purple light pulses the exact ventilation time needed, as calculated by the algorithm.
This system simplifies for the user the interpretation of the complex raw data acquired by the Fybra Home sensors, reworked by innovative algorithms capable of working in a predictive way and adapting to the actual conditions of the environment, returning a synthetic indicator, rewarded for its essentiality.
“The iF Design Award 2022 received for Fybra Home rewards the fertile collaboration with Fybra, which began earlier with the Fybra Space project,” says Adam James Cavallari, partner at 21am. “Fybra Home is the result of in-depth aesthetic and functional research that has involved both of us, and it is truly a great satisfaction to see the project receive such a prestigious award”.
Gaetano Lapenta, CEO and co-founder of Fybra, comments: “We are thrilled to receive this very important international award. Working with our friends at 21am on the Fybra Home has been very stimulating, and it has been fantastic to see how a bunch of physicists, engineers and mathematicians relied on the pen and ideas of 21am’s designers to land in such a challenging environment as the home. Two different types of creativity coming together, sparking a little bit, and then producing a winning product”.
You can find out more about the product on the Fybra website, or in the ‘Winners & Ranking’ section of the iF Design Award website.
The product
Fybra Home is the “home” version of the device patented by the Milanese start-up Fybra and already successfully adopted in schools and offices throughout Italy, involving around 40,000 students, workers and users.
The aim is the same: to guarantee health, comfort and energy efficiency – minimising the waste caused by opening windows with the heating or cooling turned on. Fybra Home achieves this thanks to a renewed formula, calibrated to the needs of those who work in smart working or spend part of their day at home.
Fybra Home: design, algorithm and wifi
Among the main features of Fybra Home:
- a completely new design, and designed to fit into the home decor;
- it can be placed on shelves and desks or hung on the wall, while Fybra for schools and offices is designed to be fixed to the wall only;
- has an extra sensor: in addition to T (temperature), RH (relative humidity) and CO2, it also measures VOC (volatile organic compounds);
- has a new dedicated algorithm that cross-references CO2, T, RH and VOC;
- autonomously learns your usage and ventilation habits and adapts to them to achieve the best performance;
- is combined with a new app for iOS and Android devices that allows you to monitor air quality trends.
Fybra Home is in the shape of a white square with rounded corners measuring 11 centimetres per side, in the centre of which is a circular hole with the LED light installed on the inner edge. It is 2.5 centimetres thick. It is powered by a cable with a USB socket and a power supply unit. To activate it at home, simply connect the product to a wifi network and configure it via app.
