Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces the Awair project creative co-design workshops, where design artefacts served as boundary objects to integrate diverse perspectives, enabling local neighbourhoods to create community-led air quality displays in London, challenging traditional environmental infrastructure design

Paper long abstract:

Environmental research increasingly acknowledges the importance of participatory approaches in engaging non-academic audiences and fostering inclusivity in scientific agendas. However, these approaches often lack reflexivity, failing to address knowledge hierarchies and bridge gaps between experts and publics. This paper presents an empirical case study where creative modalities were leveraged to dismantle knowledge hierarchies and co-create a series of novel, reproducible, solar-powered outdoor air quality displays for communicating local air quality conditions. Throughout four participatory design workshops, the Awair project brought together community members, artists, researchers, and the more-than-human (MTH) socio-technological dimensions of air quality governance in London, UK. Workshops were hosted in areas experiencing intersecting inequities, including high air pollution levels, poor health, and high digital inequality. Presented with a selection of materials and invited to play boldly, participants were encouraged to envision how air pollution could be materialised and communicated cogently and impactfully in their neighbourhoods.

We found that artistic media served as “boundary objects” or a sticky surface for materialising imaginaries emerging across the collaborative space. Encouraging “nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle” around the Awair devices problematised traditional approaches towards erecting public environmental informational infrastructures (Haraway, 2017). That is, who and what knowledges are involved in determining the design, aesthetic, content, and location of urban infrastructures? How is the consent of residents assumed and what are the ethics surrounding this? Through these questions, this paper reflects on the potential for creative modalities to collapse knowledge hierarchies and bridge gaps between traditional technoscientific actors and publics.