warning cigarette filter by m.farshad from iran

The fact that we try to remember more and more every day is that life is precious and beautiful and you can enjoy all these beauty more, when you are healthy. Some when disease attack our bodies and we have to confront them but the least we can do is to take the best care possible of ourselves and to avoid harm our own bodies. We constantly harm our bodies without giving any attention how dangerous could our activities be!
Activities such as drinking alcohol, eating high calories and high fat food, smoking, not exercising, high risk sexual relationships, …! All these can cause different illnesses for us and the sad part is that we know all these risky activities as entertainments!
Some of these entertainments not only are a threat to the person who is actually involved but also include the family, the society and our environment and one of these dangerous entertainments is smoking cigarettes! 15000000000 cigarettes are being smoked daily in the world. As we all know smoking is one of the original causes for cancer. There are a lot of horrible internal diseases that are caused because of smoking. Above all these, the damage that this amount of smoke causes is undeniable. The worst thing is that with our smoking habit, we harm every single person who is around us. Researches show that secondary smoke is as harmful as smoking itself. Smoking decreases our life expectancy and it brings us an early death. Sometimes we forget how dangerous could something we know as a habit or an amusement be. We wanted to remind smokers the danger of each cigarette and its effect on their lives and other people lives so we came up with an idea, a simple design that can impress everyone!
Cigarette and tobacco are known as the second cause of death in the world. It takes 6 million lives a year which means every 6 seconds a person dies because of smoking. It is our intention to do something about this number. We have to make smokers believe that what they are doing is really dangerous, so we can give them another chance for enjoying a long healthy life. We do not want to see children grieve because of early death of a smoker parent. This is our motivation for presenting this design. The design that we are presenting has a deep mental effect on smokers, it is not expensive, it is easy to perform and it can be mass produced. We designed something that make them think whenever they decide to light up a cigarette. When we are doing something that we are aware of its harm and we notice a sign against our action, that sign becomes more and more distractive every time, actually it becomes annoying! This is what we meant to do by designing these cigarette filters. This design can distract the smokers and show them the dark side of their habit, the dark side that they were ignoring!

As we all know there have been massages about the danger of smoking and its cause of death on most of cigarette pockets recently (as a kind of advertisement against smoking) but it seems that they did not have the effect that we hoped for. Any smoker knows that when someone smokes, he will look at the cigarette filter many times spontaneously, so we worked on that!
A sketch of a heart or a lung, a sad face, male and female signs…, will be stamped on cigarette filters. We cover the negative area of the sketch (which means the area that is around the sketch) with a colourless ink. When you want to lighten up a cigarette that has our designed filter, its filter looks just like any other regular filter but when you start smoking, each puff make the sketch more clear and in the end , it will be completely clarified. Cigarette filters have a lot of very small air holes that smoke comes through them into the smoker mouth and during the smoking process the bottom of the filter will be dark brown. When we cover the negative area of the sketch with ink, we actually covered the air holes so smoke will not pass through them and smoke will be led into the sketch area. That will make the sketch clearer with each puff. For example, if the sketch on the filter is a lung that become darker and darker. These sketches will be put randomly in cigarette pockets so smokers will see a different sketch each time they lighten up a cigarette. This random distribution lets our massage be a new one all the time so smokers cannot get used to it.
We are certain that this will be very effective because these massages will be seen during the time a person smokes a cigar and that is why it will make him think of what he is doing to his body!
This design is not like any of those massages that have been printed on cigarette pockets which you can easily ignore them or get used to them.