A sense of change: media designers and artists communicating about complexity in social-ecological systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT. To take on the current and future challenges of global environmental change, fostering a widespread societal understanding of and engagement with the complex dynamics that characterize interacting human and natural systems is essential. Current science communication methods struggle with a number of specific challenges associated with communicating about complex systems. In this study we report on two collaborative processes, a short workshop and longer course, that aimed to harness the insights of interactive media designers and artists to overcome these challenges. The two processes resulted in 86 new interactive media concepts which were selected by the participants and organizers using set criteria and then evaluated using the same criteria by a panel of communication and media design experts and a panel of complex systems scientists using the same criteria. The top eight concepts are discussed in this paper. These concepts fell into the categories of serious games, group interaction concepts, and social media storytelling. The serious games focused directly on complex systems characteristics and were evaluated to be intuitive and engaging designs that combined transparency and complexity well. The group interaction concepts focused mostly on feedbacks and nonlinearity but were fully developed and tested in the workshops, and evaluated as engaging, accessible, and easy to implement in workshops and educational settings. The social media storytelling concepts involved less direct interactions with system dynamics but were seen as highly accessible to large scale audiences. The results of this study show the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration between complex systems scientists, designers, and artists. The results and process discussed in this paper show the value of more structural engagement of interactive media designers and artist communities in the development of communication tools about human and natural systems change.

Creative convergence: exploring biocultural diversity through art

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“…Similarly, art and art making can bridge knowledge systems and generate new knowledge through collaboration (Rathwell and Armitage 2016). New visualization technologies also enable researchers to tackle social-ecological complexity and to synthesize impacts, trends, patterns, and correlations (Hinke et al 2004, Frankel and Reid 2008, Hampton et al 2013, Vervoort et al 2014). …”

How “Green Knowledge” Influences Sustainability through Behavior Change: Theory and Policy Implications

“…The government can use its credibility to effectively promote sustainable lifestyles and regulate the polluting way of production. Innovative, locally and culturally appropriate, and effective learning approaches, including informal, narrative-driven, and game-like methods [56][57][58][59][60][61][62], can be introduced.…”

Art and artistic processes bridge knowledge systems about social-ecological change: An empirical examination with Inuit artists from Nunavut, Canada

“…For example, the relationship between artists Ecology and Society 21(2): 21 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol21/iss2/art21/ and the environment has been explored in an Australian case study examining how artists harvest and utilize different species (Koenig et al 2011). The capacity of art to communicate complex ecology has also been described (Curtis et al 2012, Vervoort et al 2014. Scholars have discussed the need to integrate aesthetics more rigorously into the process of scenario planning (Ramırez and Ravetz 2011), into governance (Armitage et al 2014), and in how knowledge bridging is approached (Elgin 2002, Rathwell et al 2015.…”