Visualisations of climate crisis: put Buck House (and Celtic Park) underwater, see how much plastic you eat a week, and attend to the jellyfish
As our Tell the Story and Create the Feel strands show, we are constantly interested in how we can get people engaged with climate crisis beyond the usual verbal/textual rhetoric of politicians and policy-makers. Arts, fiction, memes… and in this blog, a brace of high-tech visualisations.
When will it always rain on me?
Above are two stills taken from This Climate Does Not Exist, a project from Quebec. They ask you to put a postcode or destination in their search box, and then (via AI) render the location suffering the costs of climate change—whether that’s rising waters, forest fire or smog. Above - and somewhat driven by this blogger’s predilections - are images of both Buckingham Palace in London, and Celtic Park in Glasgow, both somewhat submerged.
A spoonful of plastic makes the medicine go down
Plastic Air, designed by Pentagram’s Georgia Lupi, lets pieces of standard plastic consumer waste drift before you - then lets you toggle the switch between ‘seeing’ the microparticles they deposit in the air, and ‘not seeing’ them.
This Design Week article asks what “visceral” design can bring to the climate crisis, and they focus on two initiatives that focus on a grotesque but objective stat: the amount of plastic we eat each week. It’s either a credit-card-sized worth as week (as the design agency How and How renders it)…
… Or as you’ll see from Reuters’ attempt at visceral climate graphics, a cereal bowl’s worth of shredded plastic flakes every six months:
To measure the health of the planet… attend to the jellyfish
From Design Week:
From Medusae
Studio Crtq creative director Cristina Tarquini has used pointcloud visualisation to allow users to explore wildlife in the Mediterranean Ocean. Medusae asks the question, “What can jellyfish teach us about climate change?”
The project guides people through environmental changes including rising temperatures, oxygen reduction and acidification using the lens of ‘jellyfish blooms’ (an increased species population).
According to the project, jellyfish have adapted over 670 million years to be able to survive in the “most uninhabitable” conditions. Climate change therefore affects the species differently to other types of fish and their success “can serve as a clue” towards these changes.