Xiaowei Wang (center) and workshop participants prepare a FLOAT kite for flight. "The hardest part was probably figuring out how to publicize the projects to locals and draw a diverse group of people to our workshops," says Guler. "We were afraid that no one would come to the first one, but that was probably the best attended." Photo: Screenshot from Stars in the Haze.
Designers Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang are using sensor-laden kites to monitor China’s air.
Beijing’s air quality is notoriously terrible. It’s so bad that China’s leaders have begun to seal themselves off, all the while producing air-quality reports of extremely dubious accuracy. Earlier this summer, Guler and Wang took to the skies of Beijing to begin challenging the official story, attaching air-quality sensors to kites and publishing the results.
Joining them was documentarian Joshua Frank. Today, they’ve released a documentary about the project, called Stars in the Haze. The project itself is called FLOAT_beijing.
Guler says the project began when Wang, living in Beijing’s “crazy bad” air, began testing out a simple air-quality sensor. “Inspired by the decorative lights they put on kites, we set out to make an air-quality-sensing kite.”
Frank had met Wang in 2011 while on a trip to China filming a documentary about experimental music. When he heard that the team had received funding for FLOAT, “Immediately I got in touch with Xiaowei and told her that someone needed to make a documentary about the project — I wanted to be that person.”
The design of the kite sensors is based on Carnegie Mellon’s Air Quality Balloons project, with some changes to make the sensor module simpler and easier to build from parts they could source locally in Beijing. The team worked with kite masters and local citizens, running a series workshops to teach everyone how to build and fly the kites. Participants soldered the components on to a circuit board and then learned how to attach them to the kites so that their weight wouldn’t disrupt their ability to fly.
Once the kites were ready, they took them out and flew them, then retrieved their SD cards loaded with air quality data that they could use as a basis for comparison with the official readings. The comparison was rarely good.
“Air pollution is a huge issue in Beijing and in many other Chinese metropolises,” says Frank, “It seems to me that more people—especially more Chinese citizens—are becoming conscious of air quality issues and beginning to organize and take matters in their own hands when it comes to the reporting of pollution levels.”
“Our primary goal is citizen science,” Guler says. She acknowledges that there are a lot of similar projects, “but many of them are more like products, or methods of communicating wirelessly. We hope our project instills a DIY ‘you can build your own’ mentality.”
Filming the project introduced its own set of challenges, says Frank. “From a visual standpoint—and this is kind of odd—it’s actually not that easy to film people flying kites.” The problem is that the kites are so far away that it’s difficult to get them in the frame with the people flying them and they are so large that once they’re in the air, it doesn’t take much movement to keep them aloft. “It’s relaxing in a fishing-like way,” he says, “The problem is, a person holding a spool of line and craning his neck to the sky tends to look at little crazed if you can’t see a kite in the frame.”
Looking ahead, the team plans to return to Beijing next year, and Guler says she’s involved in testing the same sensors for a different air quality project in Brazil, and another project to bring the kites to Boston. “It doesn’t sound as compelling to tell people what a great job was done laying the groundwork for future development,” says Frank, “However, I am very excited to see what can be accomplished in future FLOAT installments.”
Frank sees a lot of potential in the lighting system that the team saw on the kites of dedicated hobbyists. “It seemed to me that there would be great potential to ‘hack’ these light systems and rig them up to the DIY sensors,” he says, “To have that degree of spectacle is really where citizen science, art, activism and performance can intersect for FLOAT in what I think would be a pretty revelatory way.”
Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air
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Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air
