POLLUTION EXPLORERS

Ling Tan
X
hackAIR

  • Can you introduce yourself?


I am a designer, maker and coder trained as an architect and part of Umbrellium in London, UK where as a team, we create various scales of participatory projects and tools involving citizens and cities. I am interested in how people interact with the built environment and wearable technology, using social wearables through community participation to explore different modes of interaction between people and their surrounding spaces. My work falls somewhere within the genre of wearable technology, Internet of Things(IoT) and citizen participation. As an individual artist, I am supported by FAULT LINES programme as part of FutureEverything, UK.

  • Can you present your project POLLUTION EXPLORERS?


Pollution Explorers is a participatory project co-created with the hackAIR community, that make use of hackAIR platform to help citizens make sense of the complex issues around air pollution. Made up of a series of kit-of-parts experimental wearable devices that incorporate air quality sensors and body gesture technology, it enable users to contribute data to the hackAIR community through measuring situated air quality while being mobile in the city and at the same time, record their subjective perception of the quality of air in their environment, creating a layer of “perceptual air quality data” that could help further the air quality conversation. Through discovering and cataloguing the widely varying qualities of air and how people react to them, Pollution Explorers aims to investigate personal agency and responsibility in air quality issues among citizens.

  • What do you expect from this residency?


The residency will provide me with time and opportunity to work on my interest within air quality and citizen-centric projects. Working with hackAIR will provide me with support, new insights and thinking into this field and the opportunity to work with their community of users from different parts of Europe to help co-create the wearable technology and to collectively figure out ways in which we can use the wearable tools to do something about air quality issues and affect a change to each other or to our environment.

Find more about Ling Tan project here

Inception meeting in DRAXIS, Thessaloniki, Greece, October 17th
From left to right (Emily Groves (EPFL), Sarah Unwin (FutureEverything), Panagiota Syropoulou (hackAIR) and Ling Tan (artist)