You might remember last week when we reported on the wearable pollution monitor by Conscious Clothing. Well that was a fairly high-tech example of an air pollution monitor, and one that took all sorts of things into consideration, such as the volume of air that the wearer breathes in, and so on. There’s one shirt, however, that is a little lower tech. It’s called “Warning Signs”, and its by NYU grad students Nien Lam and Sue Ngo.
The shirt is essentially a visualization of the pollution in their air. It’s designed to show the damage that can be done to your lungs when you breathe in a lot of polluted air over long periods of time. Basically, the front of the shirt has a picture of lungs on it, placed right above where the wearers lungs would be. The default color of the lungs is a nice, healthy looking pink, but when the shirt comes into contact with high volumes of pollution, it turns into a not-so-healthy blue.
The Warning Signs shirt works on carbon-monoxide levels, which is perfect because carbon-monoxide happens to be a gas that you can’t see or smell, but is toxic to humans and animals in high concentrations. What’s more is that it’s made from all sorts of things – chimneys, car fumes, and so on.
While the shirt is really only a statement, not intended for mass market production, and might not even work after you wash it a few times, it’s still a great idea, and should help raise awareness about the pollution problem that we seem to be bringing onto ourselves.
