Author: John Cheung

In Foshan, Guangdong, the design of the bicycle line is super stupid.

You can see some. bicycle line like these:

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I mean, if you are crazy about extreme sports, you will love this place. As a guy who just want to cycle around normally in the city, those bicycle lines make me mad, and confused about whether some people have a functioning brain or not.

So it’s time for some activism. I design some traffic signs like the below ones for bicycle.

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And put them on the road.

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Jam Chaser is a small quadrotor drone that carries a pot of NO2 absorbing plant(e.g Pyracantha crenatoserrata, a potted plant that has a strong ability to absorb NO2 from the air). A team of Jam Chasers is ready, when a certain road turns yellow on Google maps, they will set out and fly to where the traffic is most congested. So you will see in the off work time, a group of strange drones take off and fly to Nathan Road and other stuck roads.

Jam Chaser can be modified from a commercial product and get the traffic information from Google maps. It’s very interesting that Jam Chaser is very impractical as a solution to air pollution, but it can be very useful in another way. When you are driving and you see a Jam Chaser flying to the direction that you are going to, you would know that there is a traffic jam beyond and you’d better choose another route.

The green Cube is an inflatable airship that covered with a special kind of climbing plant growing on its surface. This kind of climbing plant has the ability to absorb the main air contaminant in Hong Kong. So, the airship is a tiny biological air cleaner. I plan to fly it on top of the factory’s roof to let it complete its clean mission and serve as a floating sculpture at the same time.

The first motivation for this is just fun. But I do hope it can also convey some messages. We have been talking about environment protection for decades, and now it gradually becomes a boring old topic just like something you would hear from your grandma. People, especially the young, don’t want any more preaching. When many of my friends see a long post about environment protection on Instagram, they just skip it. They don’t like being told what to do.

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So the question is that what can we do to promote environment protection now? How can we deliver the idea when everyone seems to be bored about that?  As I can see, nowadays, more stupid means more powerful. Thus, the answer may be to deliver the ideas in a more stupid and humorous way.