"Even Breathing Feels Like Suffering": Rethinking Information Infrastructures for Pollution and Marginalized Livelihoods

HCI has long engaged with designing technologies for marginalized communities, increasingly foregrounding environmental and social justice questions. This paper examines air pollution as structural violence, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews (n=25) with daily wagers-one of the most vulnerable urban populations, we investigate how they experience, interpret, and respond to pollution-related risks amidst information gaps and misinformation. Our analysis reveals critical shortcomings in ICT-based information dissemination, which often fails to address the needs of vulnerable groups due to challenges of trust, language, and cultural alignment. In response, we identified key design requirements and examined the suitability of IVR and WhatsApp as accessible channels in this context. We developed and evaluated (n=10) prototypes that can deliver trusted, relevant, and actionable information. We contribute an understanding of how HCI can help design resilient information infrastructures that serves vulnerable voices and strengthen community preparedness in the face of environmental crises.