Todd wanted to tell an overlooked story about indoor air quality: how it’s impacted by the seemingly mundane rhythms of daily life.

We created a website that visualizes particulate data over 24 hours by altering the legibility of Todd’s article. The more particulates in the air, the more letters in the article are obfuscated.

Each obscured character represents a particulate spike. Hovering reveals what activity caused the pollution and at what time. We also included Todd’s notes for each day, which gives more personal context to the activity that generated the particulate.

A dashboard fixed at the bottom tracks which household actions caused spikes in pollution. By default, the user’s current time is the indoor air quality that is visualized. Users can scrub through a 24-hour timeline in the dashboard to observe how particulate levels fluctuate in sync with daily routines. Users can also isolate specific categories—like “Cooking” or “Cleaning”—to understand how each one contributes to the overall air quality throughout the day. Each category is color-coded and can be easily distinguished at-a-glance by the color of the particulate.