What if a neighbourhood could breathe together?

Four years of work. Personal frustration with Lahore's smog turned into a purifier and an app, with a community-driven hypothesis at its core.

Role Founding Designer
Team Myself (Design), Moghees (Operations), Mahnoor (Software Design)
Status Prototyping & Testing

How might we help families, including the diaspora, stay connected through air quality? Our hypothesis is that bottom-up change happens when poor indoor air quality is made visible.

The purifier

Kair purifier — front view, walnut frame with dark cane grille

A purifier that didn't look like a purifier. Wood, cane, warmth. An object you'd want in a living room. Each unit includes PM2.5, PM10, temperature, and humidity sensors that feed real-time data to the community map. 120 units are in production, building a neighbourhood-scale sensor network across Lahore.

App & community

Designed for Pakistan and the diaspora abroad.

The first app tracked your own air quality. The second made it relational. A son in London checking his parents' readings in Lahore. A family coordinating around an asthmatic grandmother. When the focus shifted to diaspora and community, the entire design had to change.

Built for the individual: your sensor, your readings.

AQI · Gulberg 124
PM 2.5 48
Unhealthy
Humidity 62
Indoor 38

Community mechanics

A
Ammi · 68
Asthma · Model Town
Keep indoors until 11am AQI 124 overnight — kiln smoke. Inhaler nearby. Safe walk at 11:30.
01

Vulnerable-person alerts

Register family members with their health conditions. The app builds a day plan — when to close windows, reschedule a walk, have the inhaler ready. Ammi is the user even if she never opens the app.

Brick kiln
اینٹوں کا بھٹہ
Ferozepur Road · 180m south
Anonymous · forwarded to Punjab EPA
02

Polluter reporting

Bilingual, anonymous, photo-optional. Reports feed a public map and sync to Punjab EPA's complaint system — citizens as part of the enforcement loop.

−18% exposure
Gulberg III averaging lower PM2.5. 23 neighbours filed reports → 2 EPA kiln inspections.
F
Heavy smoke from the brick kiln behind Bibi Pak Daman. Third time this week.
03

Community feed

Alerts, wins, asks. Weekly summaries show the neighbourhood its own impact. "We reduced exposure by 18% this week" lands differently than "your AQI was 82."

How we got here

2022 Pakistan No.1 for worst air quality
Early 2023 Awareness Workshops
Mid 2023 Pivot
2023–24 Design & Build Purifier

Three things I've learnt

01

Awareness isn't enough. You have to build the thing.

Campaigns and conversations didn't move things fast enough, and they didn't give people anything to do with the information. The shift came when we stopped trying to change how people thought and started trying to change what they could do. That's when Kair became a product rather than a cause.

02

The community is relational, not geographic.

When we say Kair is for communities, we don't mean postcodes. A son in London checking readings at his parents' house in Lahore. A grandparent whose family bought them a device. These aren't neighbours in a neighbourhood — they're people who care about each other across distance. That reframe changed what data needed to be surfaced.

03

The system grows out of the first object, not a plan.

The purifier came first. The app and sensor came later, as natural extensions — things users needed once they had the hardware in their hands. We didn't design the full system upfront; we let the first product surface what was missing.

"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.

Interested in Kair, or working together on something? Book a 30-min call.

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