Sh**t! I Smoke – raising awareness around air pollution through UX Design

“Sh**t! I Smoke” is a weekend project between a developer and a designer that lets users calculate how much they are ‘smoking’ by breathing urban air in several cities of the world. The app was inspired by Berkeley Earth’s findings of the equivalence between air pollution and cigarette smoking. The rule of thumb is simple: one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22 μg/m3. It connects Berkeley’s Earth rule of thumb to open databases of Air-Quality Stations around the globe to get a precise number of cigarettes updated every hour. The name was inspired by what the creators said to themselves when they first saw the article: “we are smoking between 3 to 6 cigarettes every day in Paris without even being smokers”! Irreverent communication and streamlined user experience meant to bring the alert to everyone in the clearest terms. The goal was to raise awareness about the risks of air pollution, so the app was designed to be completely free and open-source, available for both Android and iOS devices. It was able to create a discussion around the subject of air pollution on several international media outlets, including interviews with renowned vehicles such as the BBC, The Atlantic, NBC News, and many others.