What if a community could breathe together?

Lahore's winter smog peaks above 2,000 AQI and I watched my nephews' world shrink indoors. The purifiers people owned were ugly plastic boxes, hidden in cupboards — and out of sight, the problem stops existing.

Type 0–1

Role Founding Designer
(Hardware & Software)

Team Myself & Co-founder · Hardware & software engineers

Status 100 units in production · pre-orders open

Website phirse.co

What went wrong

We ran workshops for two years and shipped nothing

We handed students design-led tools and hoped they'd build solutions. Almost none did. Awareness doesn't survive a system that gives people nowhere to take it — so we stopped teaching and started building.

An early Phir/Se awareness workshop — a presenter and a seated audience watching a slide on air quality

Directing the design across the object and the app.

Experience design in both senses. On the object: how it feels to live with, how you change a filter, why it's USB-C. On the app I direct rather than draw, working alongside a product designer.

One reading, carried across the family — and the city.

Air quality is a family problem, not an individual one. The React Native app carries one reading beyond the room it was taken in — to a parent's phone, a sibling abroad, a civic authority.

Kair app dashboard — live Air Quality Index, air history, particle matter, and health category — 01 Dashboard Live AQI, particle history, fan control and filter life — the purifier run from anywhere.

Ammi · 68 Asthma · Model Town

Keep indoors until 11am AQI 124 overnight — kiln smoke. Inhaler nearby. Safe walk at 11:30.

02 · Coming soon Friends and family A son in London checking his parents' readings in Lahore, alongside his own.

Live prototype

Polluter reporting

Anonymous bilingual reports feed a public map and sync to Punjab EPA's complaint system, putting citizens inside the enforcement loop.

Open the live prototype

Prototyping a purifier you'd actually display.

Cardboard to walnut, in five builds. My call at step four was to give up the curve we all preferred — it cost more plywood than a single sheet yields.

Cardboard Corsi–Rosenthal proof of concept — 01Proof of conceptCardboard and exhaust fans, based on the Corsi–Rosenthal box approach.

First plywood-and-cane prototype — 02Plywood & caneMoved into plywood and cane, and started iterating on the form factor.

Second plywood-and-cane form with easier filter access — 03Plywood & cane, v2A second pass on the form, focused on making the filter easier to change.

Curved plywood iteration — 04Curved iterationWe loved it, but the curves used more material than a single plywood sheet allowed.

Final route — a subtly curved form using less plywood — 05Subtle curvesSoftening the curve landed a form that worked while using far less plywood.

100 units in production. Pre-orders open.

Cardboard to working hardware, first sensors ordered, app being rebuilt. Next is getting the network into homes — a cause that became a product, and a product that became a system.

2022 Pakistan No.1 worst air quality

Early 2023 Awareness workshops

Mid 2023 Pivot to product

2024–25 Build purifier + app

"You see the bigger picture while paying attention to the details. Every project is unique, and I can tell how much thought and passion you put into the ideas. It really reflects in the way you approach a problem to solve."

Mahnoor Software Design

Let's talk.

Open to full-time remote roles and relocation.
Interested in learning more? Book a call.

Book a call ↗ Prefer to email first? →

Next project Kickd — Social app for football gamers

→