Lingnan’s low-cost compact air purifier PureAura wins Gold Award at iF Design Award 2024
The tech engineers at Lingnan University recently received the Gold Award (Product - Building Technology) at the iF Design Award 2024, one of the most esteemed and significant design competitions in the world, for their humanitarian innovation PureAura, a low-cost high-efficiency air purifier improving air quality in dense living environment.
One of the only 75 Gold Winners out of nearly 11,000 submissions, the PureAura places Lingnan University among globally illustrious brands such as Apple, Sony, Samsung, Toyota, and HP, which are also on the list, and the only Hong Kong university among the eight worldwide with this accolade to date.
The project’s leads, Prof Albert Ko Wing-yin, Director of Service-Learning and Lingnan Entrepreneurship Initiative, and Adrian Lo Chun-kwong, Product Design Lead of the Office of Service-Learning, turn recycled material into this cheap-to-build yet scientifically proven effective air-cleaning device in pocket size, addressing the hygiene and health concerns of Hong Kong’s vulnerable subdivided unit households.
Awarded as well a Silver Medal at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions last year, the air purifier designed by Lingnan Entrepreneurship Initiative (LEI) is effective in reducing the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) by 80 per cent to less than 5 μg/m3, meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) 2021 Global Air Quality Guidelines.
A thousand air purifiers were distributed free to families living in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong’s subdivided flats in 2022.
Since 1954, the prestigious iF Design Award evaluates and honours the global impact of outstanding designs from several thousand designers, architects and companies from all over the world every year. A total of 10,800 entries from 72 countries take part in this year’s iF Design Award, which is renowned as the world’s annual “Oscars of Design Industry”.
