Flying Lungs
2025
Flying Lungs invites design college students to make urban air pollution visible through hands-on, citizen science informed iterations. We collect dust from multiple sites and translate these particulate traces into graphic representations that imagine pollution as something that settles in human and nonhuman lungs.
Collaborators: Avif, Dena Septian, Felix Jordan, Dimas, Tegar
Supported by Rakarsa Foundation, Sekolah Tinggi Desain Indonesia
Image credit Avif
In the initial workshop, students were introduced to the broader context of urban air pollution in the province, including its main sources and the risks it poses to everyday life. A discussion of PM2.5 as a particle size highlighted why this danger is so hard to sense and communicate, which helps explain why public urgency often lags behind the harm. The workshop then guided students to use simple methods and readily available materials such as paper plate and vaseline to capture and make the pollution legible.
The workshop continued with artistic representation experiment by collecting dust from several spots with identification of potential pollutants from the surrounding.
Domestic and street dusts were filtered with lab-grade shifter to expose the fine particles, and shaped into human lungs.
