Smart Benches are Coming to London: Cleaner Air, Free Wifi and Charging!

Walking along Old Street, there is the new arrival of a sleek installation with bold graphics and the ever exciting sticker ‘coming soon’. This is one of Islington and Lewisham’s new ‘Smart Benches’, offering free Wifi, phone charging and air quality monitoring- all solar powered!

The smart benches are provided by Cancer Research UK in collaboration with Strawberry Energy to raise awareness of World Cancer Day on 4th February. This combines a place to sit down with the means of checking social feeds with a means of making a meaningful contribution by contactless payment. And you have a cover if it rains!

 

Free Wifi and Charging

No one seems quite sure what to do with decaying, obsolete phone boxes- the BT trumpeter kind, not the tourist red ones. Besides of course that use that seems pungently apparent when entering one, or the advertising that adorns many like wallpaper. Paid street Wifi has been an attempt to make these rarely useful features relevant for the mobile age.

However, the benches seem a continuation of this theme of reinventing old city features. Successive politicians have tried to promise universal free Wifi but as yet attempts are lacking and variable. Including the charity into the scheme is an excellent development.

Cancer Research UK already features contactless-payment donation points in some of its shop windows, proving a proactive and evolving means of fundraising. They even featured a virtual reality garden at Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. It makes sense that grateful users can tap and donate £2 on the contactless bench. This is not a fee for using the bench, but rather the bench is both advert and card reader. Just be careful where you sit with your card in your pocket!

 

Air Quality

No, smart benches don’t emit fresh air while you sit in them. However, the function as a monitor for air quality is definitely a new feature for a bench (in case you weren’t aware). The effect of this is not so much scientific as social, engaging people with the issue. We all know air quality is a big problem and Sadiq Khan has emphasised this.

The CRUK charity promotion physically links air quality and health with the bribe of free Wifi and a sit down. Users are forced to think of this correlation. This means public pressure to sort the problem and charity donation to assist the symptoms.

Where will this go? So-called Smart Cities are the future. This only evokes images of Blade Runner. Either way, there shall be smart benches presumably. With more intelligent public modules across the city for internet, charging and monitoring, who knows what the benefits could be. Could we form a constantly updated map of air trends, warning those at risk where to avoid or where to go without worry?

Phone Charging

Given we are seeing more and more people taking their power banks out with them, we are definitely burning through our phone batteries too quickly. These smart benches offer charging points- could they even solve the freelance problem of laptop charging on the go? With the ever-growing feature of contactless charging, could we eventually charge all our devices just by sitting down for a sandwich? Out-of-charge phones are responsible for delayed ambulance calls, stood-up or delayed dates and leaving engagements early because you can’t check the train times. Sure, we’re far too dependent on our phones, but these inconveniences could soon be of the past.

 

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