We humans have a hard time comprehending our future.
Fortunately, there's a lot of great science being done about our collective future. Unfortunately, this data is typically presented in a way that feels removed from our human experience. No matter how real data is — if we don't perceive it as having a direct, tangible impact on our own lives (and those of our friends and family) it will continue to be viewed as abstract and removed from our life experience.
Creativity can help answer the call to connect seemingly abstract data to people's emotions.
Arlene is exploring opportunities to annotate existing climate data to help people see themselves within the data. During a recent artist residency at MASS MoCA, Arlene worked on a series of projects to put our own life spans into climate data.
ABOVE: A visual human lifespan is added to contextualize a series of future dates.
One project was to annotate graphs from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that denote future climate trends. The graphs are annotated with a small illustration of an average human lifespan — starting with a child born today. The annotation shows how old the child will be in key years that are in the data. The inclusion of a human life span with this data helps remind us of the grand scale of the global changes that are being graphed, and how these changes will continue to impact our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews long after we're gone.
BELOW: Additional examples of human life spans visualized as part of a graph's timeline.
BELOW: Detail of the timeline with life span.
