hackAIR X Ling Tan

hackAIR

The overall objective of hackAIR is to develop and pilot test an open platform that will enable communities of citizens to easily set up air quality monitoring networks and engage their members in measuring and publishing outdoor air pollution levels, leveraging the power of online social networks, mobile and open hardware technologies, and engagement strategies.

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 hackAIR 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. Pollution Explorers builds on a previous project that the artist developed at Umbrellium called WearAQ, and introduces further wearable participatory tools co-created with the hackAIR community.

About this residency

From Nov. 17, 2017 to Nov. 30, 2018

Producer: Futureeverything
Localization: Thessaloniki, GR

pollution citizens wearable smart clothing collaboration community engagement

Ling Tan

Ling Tan is a designer, maker and coder trained as an architect and based in London, UK. She is interested in how people interact with the built environment and wearable technology, she also enjoy building physical machines and prototypes to explore different modes of interaction between people and their surrounding spaces. Her work falls somewhere within the genre of wearable technology, Internet of Things(IoT) and citizen participation. She is currently working at Umbrellium in London to understand social wearables through community participation. As an individual artist, she is supported by FAULT LINES programme as part of FutureEverything, UK.

http://lingql.com/

See Profile

Pollution Explorers is a collaboration between artist Ling Tan and hackAIR, an EU supported project that has built an open technology platform that can be used to access, collect and improve air quality information in Europe. Ling has been co-creating wearable devices to measure air quality through gestures and hackAIR’s platform. She has done this by running several community engagement workshops, in the UK and Belgium, involving the public in her practice and the development of the project. This was a completely participatory project, co-created with the hackAIR community that involved a series of workshops around Europe to collect qualitative and quantitative data.

Pollution Explorers performance at the Centre Pompidou-Paris, during the STARTS Residencies Days 2019

hackAIR has been interested in Ling’s methods of using humans, and not sensors, as air quality monitors in a way that they had not thought of before. Ling gained some important insights into human perception of air quality as opposed to conventional sensors. Her work also suggested solutions about how people can work together to make improvements in air quality that are really noticeable by the public.

Residency video

Read the final report