Last year, Kickstarted introduced us to the crowdfunded phenomenon known as + POOL.
Imagined by architectural firm Family and the design office PlayLab, the sustainable project aims to put a floating pool in New York's East River by 2016. Not your average floating pool, though. A water-filtering community attraction poised to clean up to half a million gallons of river water each day.
Think of it as a giant strainer that will weed out the bacteria, contaminants and odors that make NYC's watering holes so unappealing, leaving behind a pool that meets local and state standards. What will eventually be a 164-foot body of water (if funding and construction goes as planned), has temporarily taken the form of a smaller test lab set to capture 6 months worth of necessary data. It's in the water now, in fact, and you can follow its progress online, thanks to who else, but Google.
Float Lab
The + POOL team, along with the folks at Google Drive, have put together + POOL dashboard, an online platform that allows curious New Yorkers and sustainability enthusiasts access to the data collected off Pier 40 at Hudson River Park. Every 15 minutes, [a sonde sensor] measures some of the most important water quality parameters for swimmability: Air, Temperature, Water Temperature, Dissolved Oxygen, Rainfall, Depth, Salinity, Turbidity and Chlorophyll," + POOL explained in a press statement. "Additionally, they’re testing for Enterococcus, the EPA’s standard for water quality, once a day."
The dashboard consists of a gridded interface made up of 12 interactive colors, all of which change according to that day's water measurements. Each has a nifty little info button that explains the parameters of measurement. For example, the biggest color block is for Enterococcus (Entero), which is the EPA’s standard indicator for sewage contamination. The color will change from blue to brown depending on how “good” or “bad” the water quality was the day before, as this particular measurement takes 24 hours for the lab to process.
"We were happy to help our friends at +POOL make the data from their project easy to access and understand," Google added. "Float Lab’s dashboard is built using the Google Drive API, which is free for everyone. This is just one example of how data can be displayed in fun and even playful ways, all while helping support an important cause."
Check out the dashboard for yourself and head over to the tile-by-tile site to make a contribution to the still-growing project. Let us know your thoughts on New York's possible floating pool in the comments.
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