Air pollution is an invisible killer. Unseen, ignored, and all the more deadly as a result.

10,000 Londoners die prematurely every year due to toxic air. The Mayor of London has declared it a public health emergency. Air pollution has recently been linked to infertility, premature mortality and Covid-19 fatalities - to name but a few of the grisly consequences. And yet public apathy and political inertia were stopping action on the issue.

The data is there but it is hard to digest and seemingly irrelevant to people’s daily lives. How could we get Londoners to see the problem, and care enough to do something about it?

And as a small crowdfunded campaign group with a limited budget, how could we get a complicated, invisible issue talked about in the short term, while creating systemic change in the long term?

We made the dangers of air pollution both personal and visceral, driving attention and then systematic change.

To do this we took raw data, (1.3 billion data points in total), from King’s College London, accurate to 20msq and used it to build a 5 tier air quality rating system. The coloured system indicated the levels of the deadly pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, at any London address. To get it out there we built a website, addresspollution.org. The site not only revealed the health impacts of the property, but also the costs to their pocket.

Shocked homeowners could then demand action from their local council or the government at the click of a button. We launched the website with a multi-channel guerrilla campaign that infiltrated the property industry.

The easy to understand, scientifically rigorous, 5 colour air quality rating was information design as its most efficient. Finally, people could see what they were breathing and the effects it’s having on their bodies and in their pockets.

We needed to tell people about the service so we expanded on the information design to create a visceral, dangerous looking design system which expressed the severity and immediacy of the problem.

Spikes were chosen for their viscerality, working alongside the colours. Using billboards we targeted wealthy areas with bad air, using spiky headlines with our spikey type. 650 real-time data-sensitive DOOH grew more dangerous looking when air pollution was spiking. And we applied spikes to the organs affected by air pollution: the lungs, heart and brain.

We direct mailed estate agents, ran property classifieds, projected onto billion pound property developments. In doing so, we made the invisible problem front page news

Information design, branding and data sensitive visuals created permanent, systematic change.

WE MADE HEADLINES

We reached over 36 million people and were discussed on BBC, Good Morning Britain, Channel4, SkyNews, ITV, TalkRadio and made the front page of the printed edition of The Times twice.

WE DROVE ACTION

Over 465,467 London households have generated an Air Quality Report.

WE GOT FUNDING TO EXPAND THE SYSTEM

The European Climate Coalition awarded us funding to launch the site nationwide including two more pollutants.

WE CREATED SYSTEMIC CHANGE

Estate agents now have a legal obligation to disclose our rating system. Zoopla have made it available to their 1million monthly users. Search Smartly use our API and design system to produce ratings for every listing.

Local councils have adopted the measures homeowners petitioned. And, we achieved the policy change we lobbied for: to bring forward the ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2040.