Breathing Injustice
Redesigning Asthma as a Collective Illness Experience
Who should be able to breathe?
The Principles of Environmental Justice, first drafted in 1991, proclaimed clean air, land, water, and food to be fundamental rights. Yet more than one in ten people living in the United States have asthma, a respiratory illness that is aggravated by environmental conditions, including air pollution. The burden of asthma is unequally distributed across geographies characterized by race, ethnicity, and economic status.
I explored ways in which design might help communities facing an increased burden of illness from environmental factors to form a collective understanding of illness in order to advocate for change together.
| Designer | Todd Linkner |
|---|---|
| Keywords | critical design, workshop, asthma, environmental health, environmental justice |
| Advisor | Tad Hirsch |
Breathing Injustice Workshop
Breathing Injustice is a workshop centered around a simple device to explore asthma as a sociologically produced disease using the breath as a physical interface. The workshop simulates spatialized socioeconomic and environmental factors and their impact on the experience of asthma. This approach helps build social cohesion around the root causes by framing asthma as a collective illness, rather than one affecting isolated individuals. The kit is packaged with a curriculum guide to help community health advocacy organizations and activists facilitate asthma awareness workshops. The Breathing Injustice Workshop helps people understand asthma from an environmental perspective to form publics that can advocate for communities facing an increased burden of the disease.
Audio Guide
Air hunger, or medically “dyspnea,” gets at the essential experience of asthma. Anyone who has held their breath is familiar with the sensation of air hunger. The breathing device I designed is the central component of the workshop. The user places the tube in their mouth and breathes through it. As the user turns the dial from 0 to 6, it restricts airflow, simulating airway constriction similar to asthma.
An audio guide directs the participants’ movement through space and indicates which settings on the breathing device correspond to spatial triggers. The guide presents scenarios using narration and sound cues.
Open Source Design
I designed the workshop and breathing device to be distributed as an open-source design. The device can be produced and assembled using low-cost 3D printers and a standard cardboard spacer tube.
The typical total cost of materials for a single device is around 30¢. The 3D-printed valves require only a small amount of PLA filament. The cardboard spacer tubes can be purchased in bulk from numerous medical suppliers. Assembly is pressfit and requires no additional tools or processes.