An ontology of 'air quality' from numerical indices to embodied practices

Air Quality Indices (AQIs) are devices for monitoring and visually mapping specific airborne pollutants (gases and/or particulate matter) across geographic zones. State-endorsed AQIs inform public health research, policies and lifestyle behaviours by effectively representing environments as either safe or unsafe to both decision-makers and citizens (GLA 2013). While this representational force may render specific pollutants visible (Barry 2001, 169), it cannot speak to the diverse and dynamic relationships between bodies and aerial matter that 'air quality' ultimately denotes (Choy 2012).

This interdisciplinary research project will examine how AQIs are both validated and visualised through diverse social and technical means (Barry 2001, 158; Choy 2012, 32; also Bryant 2014). First, via multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with air quality analysts and critically or speculatively engaged designers (Dunne and Raby 2013), I will delineate the formative stages in the production of an AQI to indicate where design thinking or community consultation could intervene. Second, I will then develop accounts of air pollution that transcend indexable representation through an embodied practice of what I term 'airscaping'. Airscaping is intended to mobilise 'more-than-representational' modalities (Lorimer 2005) for paying heed to air pollution that invoke an affective urgency befitting the scale of the problem2 in ways that numerical indices cannot. After all, 'air quality' only exists as a concept because it refers to an impact on life, not just to the concentrations of specific pollutants at a fixed location. In other words, 'air quality' is not an abstract property that inheres in air, but a complex relationship between diverse breathers and dynamic pollutants (Born and Barry 2010, 114).