Partner With Google on Public Water Quality Dashboard

We launched Float Lab off of Pier 40 in Hudson River Park with the goal of solving the fundamental aspects of our proposed filtration system that would allow us all to swim in the river. To do that, we weren’t only taking daily samples of the water in the test pools, but we were constantly testing the water quality of the Hudson River.

Every 15 minutes, our water quality instruments would test a whole suite of parameters (chlorophyll, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and much more), and they’d automatically get stored online in the cloud.

One day, as we were preparing for the launch of Float Lab, we got invited into Google Creative Labs to present + POOL to their team. They were blown away by the amount of data we were planning on capturing (more water quality data than had ever before been collected on the river), and offered to take all the data collected from Float Lab and made it public and available to all.

Together, we built + POOL dashboard, which transcribed all that data in the simplest and most compelling way we could, so that people who knew nothing about water quality (which was obviously us until we decided to start making a water-filtering, floating pool) could understand it. The dashboard presented real-time data on 7 parameters that affect water quality in the river and inform the design of + POOL, but at the end of the day it simply told you whether the water was good or bad that day.

The dashboard was only up for the duration of Float Lab’s testing cycle, but paved the way for what we could continue to do to educate people on the issues affecting our water quality.