Design space: personal zone air purifier

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Traditional air purifiers claim to clean all the air in a room. Unless a room is completely sealed, however, new contaminants can get in.

Humanscale wanted to create a more targeted air purifier that would focus on cleaning the air being breathed – the so-called breathing zone around the user’s mouth.

The office furniture company teamed up with Swedish inventor Andrzej Loreth, who had developed an air-purification technology for big areas such as subway stations. Humanscale’s 20 designers and engineers in New York set about shrinking Mr Loreth’s technology down for personal use.

They built a device with an electric field at the back, which negatively charges all the particles as they are drawn into it by fans, so that the polluted particles stick to a positively charged paper filter inside. The air then passes through a carbon-based filter to eliminate odours and leaves the front of the unit, delivering purer air to the user’s breathing zone. The result is a near-silent, breeze-free device, so it can be positioned near the user.

The Personal Zone Air Purifier removes 96 per cent of airborne particulates at a range of 18in from the user, compared to a rate of 50 per cent for the best-in-class of the most common form of filters.