This project was a response to creating a piece which create a call to action for the user. I did quite a lot of primary research for this project because I wanted to truly get an understanding of exactly how much pollution there really is. I went through the data set that is available and is quite reliable however I wanted to get a first hand view of this data.
I created a device with an Arduino which would read a signal from a MQ9 Sensor (which detects carbon monoxide) and write it to a file every second. It was rather interesting to see how the sensor works in realtime and it got me thinking that I would be able to go around London with this device and essentially collect the data. I then looked into other methods that may be more effective to collect the air pollution and came across this article that explained that you could essentially collect pollution particles from the air utilising a microscope slide with tape/vaseline. I experimented this and it worked quite well!
I wanted to create an awareness of which even the Mayor of London could even get involved with. I decided to create a series of postcards that are made with seeded paper, essentially demonstrating the pollution as a half pollution half normal with the images being the most polluted streets of London. I began to think how potentially people may not believe that the image is actually the pollution so therefore I decided to utilise real ‘pollution’ from a cars emissions and then utilise this to paint the postcards.
On the reverse side it was detailed how to prevent the pollution and invited the user to send the postcards to new people making them aware of the problem. If the person didn’t want to do anything they can simply put the card in soil and it will essentially grow a plant that will contribute to remove the carbon in the long run.
The piece was shown to GreenpeaceUK, CleanSpace and TFL who both seemed rather interested in the project idea!
