Air, Body, Apparatus

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TEI Paper: Wetsuit

Research Dossier: Air, Body, Apparatus

Air, Body, Apparatus: Environmental sports systems: air, atmosphere, and athletic performance

2023-2024
In collaboration with Canada Goose

The project proposes a future in which athletic equipment operates not only as protection and performance enhancement but as an active interface between the body and the environment — making invisible ecological conditions visible, perceptible, and actionable, and taking the heavily regulated female athletic uniform as a starting point rather than a constraint to be circumvented.

Air, Body, Apparatus investigates how invisible environmental conditions shape athletic experience, performance, and health, and asks how sportswear and athletic equipment might be reconceived as active interfaces between the body and its surroundings rather than as protective gear alone. It situates this question within feminist sport theory, treating the regulated female athletic body as central to both the problem and the design response.

Using ice hockey as a case study, the research examines the relationship between athletes and the atmospheric conditions of sporting environments — how air quality, pollution, temperature, and environmental exposure act on the body during performance. The project emerged from research into indoor ice rinks, which are among the most pollutant-saturated athletic environments in regular use. Fossil-fuelled ice resurfacing equipment, enclosed and often poorly ventilated structures, and the high-intensity breathing the sport demands combine to expose athletes to elevated concentrations of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ultrafine particulates, and volatile organic compounds. Two decades of medical research link these conditions to exercise-induced bronchoconstriction and long-term decline in lung function — and women's players appear particularly at risk, even as they receive less respiratory screening, monitoring, and protection than their counterparts in elite men's leagues.

Developed in collaboration with Canada Goose and grounded in fieldwork at Streatham Ice Arena in London, the project works across three strands. Low-cost environmental sensing, built on Arduino/ESP32 systems, was tested in a controlled chamber and on-site to characterise the rink atmosphere. Material experimentation produced bio-based filtration samples — cellulose foams combined with activated charcoal — developed for integration into hockey equipment, including helmet-integrated filtration structures and activated-carbon textile interventions for the jersey. Computational visualisation in TouchDesigner translated sensing data into generative particle fields, making invisible atmospheric conditions perceptible through immersive digital environments.

Two theoretical frames hold the work together. The first is the permeable athletic body: the athlete is not a sealed unit moving through neutral air but a surface continuous with the atmosphere drawn deep into the lungs with every breath. The second draws on feminist sport history and the sociology of the body — from Susan Cahn's account of how female athletes' apparel has been policed as a matter of decency, difference, and enforced femininity, to Jennifer Hargreaves' analysis of the uniform as an ongoing site of contestation in women's sport. From the Norwegian beach handball fines to the Serena Williams catsuit ban and debates over hijab regulations, the female athletic body remains a regulated material surface in ways the male body generally is not. Women's ice hockey makes this asymmetry concrete: full face cages and comprehensive equipment are mandatory in the women's game where men's protection is lighter and was long optional.

This regulated condition is where the project's design argument turns. The work does not romanticise uniform regulation — historically it has been used to constrain, gender, and discipline female athletes, and it remains contested. But, grounded in consultation with a former UK national women's team player, the project finds that integrating filtration into equipment an athlete already wears does not register as dystopian in the way consumer devices — with their pandemic-era associations — often do. Where comprehensive uniform regulation already exists, it opens an under-recognised design space for wearable interventions that work for the athlete rather than against her. That women's players carry both heightened environmental health risk and the most heavily regulated uniforms raises pointed questions about institutional responsibility for women athletes' respiratory health.

Rather than viewing sportswear solely as performance equipment, the project proposes athletic garments and equipment as environmental interfaces capable of sensing, filtering, communicating, and responding to ecological conditions. The contribution is a research prototype framework rather than certified protective equipment: a way of linking sensing, biofabrication, and feminist material critique that makes a documented but neglected health concern visible and actionable.

Bio-based filtration materials. From cellulose extracted from dried leaves I developed a family of foams, including a charcoal-loaded version for adsorption, tested for flexibility, absorption and durability. The aim was a grown, sustainable material that could be built into protective equipment rather than manufactured from synthetics.

Real-time visualisations translating live air-quality sensor data from the ice rink into spatial particle fields. Developed in TouchDesigner, each field renders an otherwise invisible airborne pollutant — its measured concentration driving the density, movement, and colour of the particles — making the atmosphere athletes breathe during training perceptible as a visible, immersive environment. Three pollutants are visualised: PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) as a dense white-grey dust field; CO₂ (carbon dioxide) as a slow pale-blue pressure field that builds with crowd density; and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) as short-lived, turbulent amber plumes that surge with each spike from the ice-resurfacing equipment.