Inventive Devices and Public Issues: The Air Pollution Toile

This chapter discusses the ways outputs from art and design anticipate futures. It uses a case study of the Air Pollution Toile (Kimbell, 2018) which took the form of a concept for wallpaper that reacts to interior air pollution, revealing imagery of diseased human organs. The chapter reviews literatures at the intersection of design and futures, noting how they emphasise design’s materialising agency and multiplicity in exploring futures, along with the political and ontological work in so doing. It then turns to air pollution, a public health issue around the world, particularly in lower and middle income countries. The chapter summarises creative projects that address air quality, distinguishing between those that represent the issue, intervene into it or problematise it. Drawing on traditions of toile de Jouy in interior decoration, the chapter then describes the Air Pollution Toile wallpaper which includes imagery of everyday activities in urban Europe through which air pollution is produced and encountered. It argues that the wallpaper establishes new relations between domestic settings, scientific research and industrial production in relation to air pollution, while at the same time obscuring the issue