Out There and All Around
What is the link between an upcoming Mars landing, old Japanese fishing villages, and Greenland’s melting ice sheets?
The answer to what sounds like a bad joke lies in the layered nature of the research findings obtained by our team during Sprint 4 of the Digital Society School Program.
In Sprint 3 we crafted a detailed research protocol with which we evaluated a number of TED Talks clustered under the tag “climate change”. The research protocol was a list of more than 35 questions ranging from sentiment analysis to body language, including speech content and a section focusing on the audience reaction. For each answer we would add quotes and timestamps, along with screenshots portraying the speakers delivering their messages.
At this point curiosity was consuming us: we couldn’t wait to navigate the vast sea of climate narratives, our research model being the shiny new boat leading us to uncharted territories.
But we soon discovered that our shiny new boat had some holes.
As we began analyzing the videos, and upon meeting with the Visual Methodologies Collective, we felt the need to further refine the questionnaire. We were getting tangled up in endless details, scrutinizing the speakers’ gestures while trying to grasp the essence of their message. Furthermore, it had been extremely difficult to fit all the speeches’ subtleties in one fixed frame. Put simply, it was too much.
In an attempt to sketch out a list of revised questions, we decided to take a step back from the talks and brainstormed possible directions for a final prototype. What insights would we need in order to present meaningful findings to our client, Climate Cleanup? What would they find most interesting?
After a long ideation session, we took a deeper look at the questionnaire and thoroughly refined it. First, we identified five points we felt compelling in climate change communication: the call to action, the “as is framing” — defined as the issue or phenomena, the “to be framing“ — namely a desired future or a number of scalable solutions , the time reference — when the speaker would mention past, present and future scenarios, and lastly, the visual aids. Also, in order to widen the range of thought leaders, we combined our initial list with the one shared by Climate Cleanup, and cross-referenced it with a compilation of 100 most influential personalities in climate policy according to apolitical.com.
After refining our research protocol, we now had a total of ten questions, well-adapted to our content and straight to the point. With our new revised questionnaire, we finally managed to analyze 24 TED talks.
The variety of topics discussed and depth of the conversations were utterly overwhelming. We realized that climate scientists, writers, economists are all engaged in crafting a more positive view on the challenges global warming is presenting us with. The bottom line: climate crisis can be solved, and humanity has the moral imperative to change its socio-political norms in order to smooth the passage to a more desirable future.
We could already sense some sort of convergence between the narratives, but how could we actually prove it?
Using qualitative methods, we drew a chart of all the patterns spotted across the thought leaders’ messages and paired it with text-mining, a quantitative technique we employed to track the sentiment profiles of the talks.
While evaluating TED Talks we also learned how a narrative’s aesthetics influences the effectiveness of the message itself. Although we knew our research was rich in content, our visual display of this information was still poor. We wanted to frame our findings so they could be appealing for a larger audience, regardless of social status or occupation.
We then tested different designs, matching them with the elements we wanted to see visualized, and ended up with three possible paths. In the first platform-like visualization we would have all 24 narratives sitting next to each other, clustered by recurrence of themes and overall tone. In the second option we would animate each narrative, presenting the content in a more condensed way, as well as playing with different colors for a more pleasant learning experience. Lastly, we tried sketching different “portraits”, icons, and abstract visual scenarios to represent the main recurring elements across narratives.
After three weeks of hard work, it was time to finalize our findings and head to our sprint review. Climate Cleanup’s response was enthusiastic and together we began discussing potential next steps for the final prototype.
With our minds still processing the huge amount of material analyzed, the journey continues. Only one thing is sure: brace yourself for Sprint 5!
The Digital Society School is a growing community of learners, creators and designers who create meaningful impact on society and its global digital transformation. Check us out at digitalsocietyschool.org.
