La nuvola di smog is the result of one week workshop "Making Data Public" with professor Carl Francis DiSalvo. The brief was to analyze a dataset and to make it public, bringing the message to the people in a non-conventional way.
The project we developed aims to raise awareness about the topic of urban pollution. We decided to directly involve people into the data collection process: since fine dusts are directly in contact with people in their everyday city life we decided to make them be more conscious of the problem by giving them the possibility to see smog in a concrete way. We therefore created a cotton-pad-kit that helps people capture smog in the air.
We then considered that this very same process, the fact of people collecting smog through pieces of cotton, allows us to collect samples and to create a database to be visualized. We therefore ask people to upload their results on our website in order to add it to a visualization that offers an alternative big picture of the situation of pollution at the moment.
This project is not aimed to collect scientific data, since control units already exists and already make their data public; what we want to do here is to make people feel more inside the problem and to let them see it not through numbers but in a tangible way and then to see others results.
A parallel part of the cotton-kit is the wheel covers kit.
The postcard kit is more of a launch campaign, but the experiment of smog testing is always feasible using any piece of cotton and following instructions on the website. In spite of this we thought we needed a way to keep it viral, to keep the idea of smog testing + participating to the database construction alive.
For this reason we decided to use bicycles, as symbols of green behavior, as ambassadors, equipping them with informative wheel covers that people can easily create and apply to their bicycle and carry around to show their support.
The postcard kit is more of a launch campaign, but the experiment of smog testing is always feasible using any piece of cotton and following instructions on the website. In spite of this we thought we needed a way to keep it viral, to keep the idea of smog testing + participating to the database construction alive.
For this reason we decided to use bicycles, as symbols of green behavior, as ambassadors, equipping them with informative wheel covers that people can easily create and apply to their bicycle and carry around to show their support.
WEBSITE
On the website we provide people with the information they can use, so that everyone can have a customized wheel cover, and how to make them, as well as the infographics showing the contribution of all people participating.
