Air Quality Awareness
Client: Waag society

AiR

The client for this project is Waag Society which describes itself as “an interdisciplinary non-profit media lab researching and developing new technology, art and culture. (The Waag Society) mission is to provide meaning and give direction to the role of technology in society. In interdisciplinary teams and in close co-operation with end-users it develops technology that enables people to express, connect, reflect and share information, emotions and responsibilities”.

Our design team was tasked with a very open-ended task: visualise air pollution. Waag Society has explored a lot of different methods of communicating air quality to the target group over the years: sculptures, instillations, screens, posters etc, and they were looking to IDE students to offer a fresh and unique perspective to the challenge of making the invisible visible — and making people care.

We ourselves were shocked when we had access to the Citizen Science air quality monitoring data and were very motivated to get to work. After considering many different approaches, we decided the best way to raise awareness of air quality was indeed to find a way to “see” all the invisible particles in the air.

After experimenting with the sculpture concept using mist and lights, we ended up choosing a very different approach: interactive augmented reality experience which anyone with a smart phone could use.

The project not only introduced me to an open ended design process, prototyping, required that I learn the basics of coding and how extracting relevant data from an API and converting that into visuals.