Year
2018-2019
4
Project Type
Speculative Design
Organisation
Royal College of Art | Imperial College London
Cellul-Air
With increasing urbanisation, we’re faced with an urgent crisis; the air in our cities is becoming increasingly toxic. In the coming decades, more and more people will fall victim to chronic respiratory illnesses, stroke, and heart attacks due to dirty urban air. It’s easy to see the urgency of the problem, yet it is hard to see real action taking place to combat it.
Cellul-air is a speculative project that proposes the use of pollution-fighting bacteria in public air filtration systems. By using bioremediation, the natural process that uses certain microbial strains to absorb and break down pollutants, this project was able to project a future where these super strains could be enhanced in order to clean air effectively.
Objectives + Challenges
Problem Statement
This project was one of our final graduation projects from the RCA and Imperial, and we had an open prompt. We chose to take on the challenge of urban air pollution and design a potential new filtration and bioremediation urban air system.
Target Audience
General public | Student and Teaching group
Collaboration
Alexander Facey (myself), Kate Strudwick, Nicole Stjernsward, Timi Oyedeji
We wore many hats over the project and contributed across most aspects of the project. I headed up mechanical design and builds of the prototypes through the iterations, as well as the air quality enhancement properties of the microbes.
Goals | Constraints |
|
|
Process + Approach
Methodology
This project was an iterative creative experiment backed by continued research and reading. We conducted physical exploration and trials as well as basic calculations of viability before settling on a design and iterating forwards to create it.
Key Activities
|
|
Tools & Technologies | Materials | ||
|
|
|
Solutions, Deliverables + Outcomes
Final Output
We created a high quality, speculative design concept of a modular microbial based air filter for urban spaces. It would have the ability to be adjusted and inoculated for specific environments with a suite of different microbes.
We designed it as a closed system to prevent environmental contamination.
Key Features
Organic shaped cells to hold the different microbes.
Visual forward design & wall mounting
Technical Specifications
We did an analysis of the prior art in the space, identifying some potentially promising microbes for study and trial for their bioaccumulation potential.
Outcomes + Comments
Outcomes
This project was received incredibly well by both the general public and our cohort. We were invited to exhibit at multiple events detailed and shown below.
Lessons Learned
We learned a lot in those three months about team work, working with organic material, and the benefits of rapid and open minded experimentation.
Awards & Recognition
Write up in the Evening Standard: Tube pollution: Could bacteria create clean air on the London Underground?
Semi-Finalist: Environment Award, Mayor's Entrepreneur Prize 2019
Personal Commentary
This project really turned out incredibly. We had so much interest from all who saw it, even biology students were excited about it! It really shows the impact that speculative design can have.
If I think critically about the true feasibility, I think it's definitely possible, they use microbes extensively for waste water treatment for example, but I would probably guess that in the long run we will release the microbes directly into the air, instead of a bioreactor system to keep them alive. Doing so has its own challenges and risks, so this design could work as a middle ground.
What we could have added in addition, is a discussion of what kind of useful byproducts could be made by these microbes. Gas fermentation is a high potential technology at the moment so definitely an area of further interest for the future.
OTHER PROJECTS
