CRI听力:Crowd-Sourcing Clean Air

The problem of air pollution is so big most people may feel powerless to do anything about it.

But this hasn't stopped a couple of Beijing residents setting up a competition they hope will inspire some grassroots solutions to this pressing issue.

Fei Jun is founder of the organisation Interactive Beijing.

"We involve designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and investors to work together on specific topics to help incubate crazy ideas. That's our mission."

Some of the crazy ideas proposed so far have involved buildings that reduce pollution, and bicycles that produce clean air.

The ideas are developed during short workshops where this wide range of skilled people are encouraged to focus their creative energies on solving some of today's most pressing problems.

Xin Lulu is Creative Director at Interactive Beijing.

"In our campaign we want to call for this new collectivism to rescue our last public asset, which is the air. As we all know, you can't meter it, you can't measure how much you breath. It can't be privatised. And you see how people react to this by putting masks on. I don't think that's a solution. This totally reflects the fact the public's run out of ideas. It's a serious crisis."

Eight of the best ideas will be given an expert to help further development, with the chance of receiving money to go into production.

Interactive Beijing is itself a new organisation having only started a few years ago.

They try to connect talented creative people skilled at problem solving with some of society's biggest problems.

"We take on the most urgent social problems... This year we couldn't ignore the air problem any more. So we were thinking, yes, this is an urgent issue. We design for change and we want to design for air quality change and leverage our platform to make this happen. It doesn't mean we are going to provide solutions, we want to crowd source solutions to spread awareness of this urgent issue."

Interactive Beijing is itself a start up. This is the first time they're focusing on one specific issue.

To what extent they succeed is still up in the air. But at the very least they hope to raise awareness of the problem of pollution.

For CRI, I'm Dominic Swire.