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Images of climate change – a pilot study of young people’s perceptions of ICT-based climate visualization

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Abstract

Climate change can be difficult for laypeople to make sense of, because of its complexity, the uncertainties involved and its distant impacts. Research has identified the potentials of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for visualizing and communicating climate change to lay audiences and thus addressing these communication challenges. However, little research has focused on how ICT-based visualization affects audiences’ understandings of climate change. Employing a semiotic framework and through a combination of focus group interviews and mindmap exercises, we investigated how Swedish students make sense of climate messages presented through an ICT-based visualisation medium; a dome theatre movie. The paper concludes that visualization in immersive environments works well to concretize aspects of climate change and provide a starting point for reflection, but we argue that the potential to add interactive elements should be further explored, as interaction has the potential to influence meaning-making processes. In addition, audiences’ preconceptions of climate change influence their interpretations of climate messages, which may function as a constraint to climate communication.

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Notes

  1. The digital dome theatre in the Norrköping visualization centre covers 165° of a sphere with a 15 m diameter with a total screen surface of approximately 300 square meters with six separate projectors, which enables the entire screen to be used for images, featuring a total resolution of 3710 × 3180 pixels. The production was based on the interactive 3D visualization software IceDome.

  2. As a service to the teachers and students, all students from the education program were invited to the dome presentation, not only those participating in the focus groups included in the study. In total, approximately 90 students visited the dome presentation.

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Acknowledgments

The preparation of this paper has been supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council for the project “Making sense of climate change—a study of the formation and maintenance of social representations” (project no. 2008-1723) and by the Nordic Top-level Research Initiative through the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Strategic Adaptation Research (NORD-STAR). The authors wish to thank the students for participating in the focus group interviews, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Thematic Studies - Environmental Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne, Victoria Wibeck & Tina-Simone Neset

  2. Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne, Victoria Wibeck & Tina-Simone Neset

  3. Department of Business Development and Technology, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, Birk Centerpark 15, DK-7400, Herning, Denmark

    Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne

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  1. Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne
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  2. Victoria Wibeck
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  3. Tina-Simone Neset
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Correspondence to Anne Gammelgaard Ballantyne.

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Ballantyne, A.G., Wibeck, V. & Neset, TS. Images of climate change – a pilot study of young people’s perceptions of ICT-based climate visualization. Climatic Change 134, 73–85 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1533-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1533-9

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