Tag: Storytelling

Pollinator-Friendly Solar at the Fair

Posted on | by admin
For this year's Minnesota State Fair, we've teamed up with Fresh Energy and Connexus Energy to create a three-dimensional display to draw attention to a new way of thinking about renewable energy: Pollinator-friendly solar. Preserve Pollinators Our display, part of "The Common Table: Minnesota Eats" exhibit in the Agriculture Horticulture Building, highlights how our region is leading the way in policymaking and on-farm efforts to bring more pollinator habitat to otherwise underutilized land. You can see the exhibit in-person from August 23 through September 3, along with nearly two million other fair-goers (who famously flock to the event for all kinds of foods and creations "on a stick"). Of course, our sticks — a series of cutout landscape elements and hide-and-seek pollinators for you to find — will be glued down, but you're sure to learn a lot about the powerful partnership of pollinators and solar energy!

Planning for Growth

Posted on | by admin

Online engagement tool shapes the City’s future

The latest phase of our work with the City of Minneapolis launched this week: A new online, interactive engagement tool designed to involve residents in shaping the next 20 years of City development.

Minneapolis 2040

This visual story utilizes a scrolling technique called “parallax,” which creates a deeper, more immersive online experience. Visitors to the page will be introduced to City planning information in a new & fun way, and have the opportunity to leave feedback on the action items presented. Their comments will inform Minneapolis planners’ decision-making on future City policies.

Feedback collected during this phase of development will go into the City’s Comprehensive Plan, titled Minneapolis 2040. The plan will cover topics such as housing, job access, the design of new buildings, as well as how we use our streets — all in the name of smart, sustainable development.

Check out the live site at growth.minneapolis2040.com

‘Emotional’ Sustainability for a Post-Truth World

Posted on | by admin

Visual storytelling reveals context and appeals to our individual beliefs

Riding the tails of Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, Oxford Dictionaries has selected “post-truth” as 2016’s international word of the year.

Emotional AppealIt’s not hard to believe, given the events of the past year, to see how people do not make decisions based purely on fact. Appeals to our personal beliefs and emotional centers are important. Data alone does not influence decisions. To a large portion of society, facts simply do not matter.

Feelings matter. Connection matters.
I can spout off statistics and information, but unless you — my audience — feel connected to it, it won’t make a difference. The author of ‘How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail’ also describes the mental stress that we endure when we hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time (a.k.aCognitive Dissonance). He acknowledges the need for a calm discussion when presenting new information — and new facts — to an individual with a strong pre-determined worldview. So what are some ways visual communication can help make sustainability information appeal to our emotions, and allow us to gradually open our minds to new information?

Here are a few key points and resources: 

Show & Tell Data as a Story
Numbers, by themselves, are not generally very welcoming. Deciphering numbers and comparisons requires a lot of effort and time — particularly given that 65% of the population are visual learners (Mind Tools, 1998). Icons and illustrations can provide context for the numbers. Diagrams can show how a set of data flows over time.

Use Visuals that Connect to Individuals
This research shows how people interpret visual images of climate change. The report finds, for example, that protest images do not resonate, however images of real people taking action in a local context do resonate.

Communicate the Context of your Social or Environmental Goal
Show individuals how bigger picture climate consequences will impact their personal lives. This can mean mapping out the narrative in a visual infographic or developing a diagram to walk audiences through how a larger goal is connected to individuals and their families.

The [Unequal] Power of Images

Posted on | by admin

When to use a photo vs. an icon

There are many style options available when it comes to communicating information visually. Photos excel at evoking emotion in individual scenarios, when the photograph literally represents what is being communicated.

Photograph of a tree Icon of a tree

Icon-focused infographics tend to group information on a more broad level: reflecting general patterns and information rather than specific, individual – and quite often emotional – experiences.

Consider this example: This tree photo points to a very specific situation and can evoke memories. Maybe it reminds you of one that you played under growing up. Alternatively, perhaps the species of tree on this rolling, green landscape looks nothing like where you live. That makes it harder to relate to.

An icon, on the other hand, is more versatile. The icon evokes the idea of ‘tree’ regardless of your own memories. It is perceived more generally as ‘tree’ rather than ‘deciduous tree’ or ‘kinda-like-our-climbing-tree’.

In short: 

  • Use a photo for specific circumstances, details, case studies and people
  • Use an icon for general concepts, broad mapping, global systems and universal ideas.

Case studies are a great place to use photographs because they need to communicate details of a specific story. When the desire is to communicate a more global, standardized concept or structure, icons are generally a better choice. The 2 approaches can certainly be combined in a well-thought-out visual.

Motivating Sustainable Behavior

Posted on | by admin

How can we help people act more sustainably?

According to a series of studies from the Harvard Business Review, ‘seeing’ ourselves in the future helps us make decisions that prioritize long-term benefits to our future selves (over short-term gains).

One study had half of participants interview digitally-aged avatars of themselves. Then participants did a seemingly-unrelated exercise to divide a budget. Those who had interacted with their future selves allocated twice as much of the hypothetical budget to retirement.

There’s already a lot of literature showing that response is stronger when you people are given vivid examples -those that touch them emotionally. So these studies seem to suggest that long-term thinking can be accessed through establishing emotional connection with the future.

In sustainability, ’the future’ is already plastered throughout tag lines and campaigns: “for our children” or “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” are common examples. However, these phrases often aren’t positioned in a way that helps the ‘future self’ of individuals become visible. Maybe instead of talking about the future in vague, society-oriented terms, we should spend more time helping people see themselves in their own future. This could involve helping people understand the ways in which data or information parallels with their own, individual future. Or how trends over time align with their children’s existence.

So let’s help people first envision their own futures; in order to prepare individuals to understand the important role that sustainability plays in life.

Global Mean Sea Level Rise

Artist Residency to Visualize Impacts in Malmö, Sweden

Posted on | by admin

Arlene has begun an artist residency at interactive center for new media MEDEA, where she will develop work to visualize the impacts/benefits of bicycling for the Västra Hamnen area of Malmö in order to encourage and celebrate a culture of bicycling.

More on the progress of the project, which will run Oct-Dec 2010, is posted on the MEDEA site.

sketch of visualizing sustainaiblity in bicycling

WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Tracing A Box’s Life

Posted on | by admin

Colombia Sportswear is asking you to ‘Consider the box’ with their project: A Box Life. A Box Life brings awareness to an often-overlooked part of mail-order products’ life-cycles: the packaging.

Box life transparently tracks the back-stories of where boxes have traveled.
Box life transparently tracks the back-stories of where boxes have traveled.

Not only is it a clever way to encourage people to reuse packing materials, but telling the stories behind the travels of things also acts as a tool for transparency, and reminds consumers of how individual actions impact sustainability.

read more: Springwise

Mapping the Mississippi: Through Time

Posted on | by admin | 1 Comment on Mapping the Mississippi: Through Time

In a beautiful example of layered visual information, Harold Fisk mapped a portion of the Mississippi River in 1944. The series of plates show the changes in the path of the river through time. I’m drawn to the simple and clear detail, effective color palette and the amount of information communicated through this simple technique.

Fisk Map of the Mississippi through the ages
A portion of Fisk’s visually-stunning map of the Mississippi

The full map is available at the US Army Corp of Engineers.

Toaster, from Scratch

Posted on | by admin

The Toaster Project: A design student’s fascinating project to make a toaster – starting with finding and processing small quantities of raw materials.The project took him all over the UK searching for raw minerals, and developing methods to process them at home.

His whole process was about re-creating the background story. I’d love to see a graphic outlining all of his steps.

the final toaster (photo Daniel Alexander)
the final toaster (photo Daniel Alexander)

The project is featured on we-make-money-not-art.com

Tracking water droplets: Playing raincloud.

Posted on | by admin

An exhibit on Water at the Science Museum of Minnesota contains an interactive display that allowed people to ‘become’ a raincloud. By rubbing a ‘raincloud’ tool over a series of screens displaying a topographic map, the cloud rains drops of water onto the topo-map. Visitors can see how the drops of water run down the sides of a topographic map to slow and pool together in the valleys between mountains. Colliding together, the blue drops create rivers which meander through valleys until falling off the screen.

Interactive table created interaction for watersheds
Interactive table created interaction for watersheds

As a fun way for visitors to interact with the exhibit, this project helps people understand how water flows (the fact being downhill- which I thought was obvious, but apparently there is an overwhelming number of people who are surprised when rivers turn to flow North instead of South, as on maps they must have an idea that gravity makes the water flow off the page.)