Rhythm and Glue: An Entertainment-Education Prototype for Climate Communication

Abstract

This prototype of entertainment-education protocols is adapted for mainstream American audiences for climate change mitigation. The example demonstrates how entertainment-education can be used for creating community adaptation and resilience in supporting rapid transitions for sustainability. Using a narrative approach for climate communication, the Rhythm and Glue story emphasizes personal and collective efficacy, including layered examples of how climate change is already affecting the health of Americans. In the serial comedy drama, Rhythm and Glue, a Los Angeles community humorously learns to collaborate, sharing their skill sets to build a better city. Slapstick, romantic entanglements, and career advancement anchor the story, while real-time audience participation drives engagement with climate topics. Audience participation facilitates engagement increasing the capacity of existing climate mitigation programs. Each season presents an overarching climate change issue. Season One focuses on transportation transitions and the current health impacts of climate change, with subsequent seasons addressing; energy, water, food, and waste. The show highlights the realities of climate change facing residents of the United States and presents realistic solutions and behaviors that citizens can take to mitigate those effects, for themselves and their communities.

Entertainment-education (EE) is an internationally recognized strategy that leverages the power of storytelling in entertainment programming for social and behavioral change (Wang & Singhal, 2021). Since its earlier days, EE initiatives have used compelling narratives, inspiring characters, engaging mechanisms, and connection to real-world resources to address public health concerns and complex social issues such as family planning, adult literacy, HIV/AIDS, and domestic violence (Singhal, 2004; Singhal et al., 2013; Singhal & Rogers, 2002). For over 50 years, EE scholars and practitioners have expanded its theory and praxis to more diverse topic areas, entertainment genres, and media platforms to adapt to societal shifts and technological advancement (deFossard, 2008; Frank & Falzone, 2021; Storey & Sood, 2013; Wang & Singhal, 2009). I believe that EE can contribute to a versatile set of tools for the design and implementation of effective climate communication we need now. As articulated in several chapters within this volume, many EE flagship organizations have already shown commitments in the area of sustainable development, environmental health, and climate change (Bish, 2024; Brown, 2024; Garg et al., 2024; Sood et al., 2024) while socially-conscious creative industry professionals and environmental advocacy groups are also devoting more efforts in effective storytelling to facilitate positive climate actions (Falzone et al., 2024; Gurney & N’Diaye, 2024; Hinderfeld et al., 2024; Spiegel & Wang, 2024). My contribution here is to share an EE prototype for climate communication based on my evolving understanding and experiences in both of these worlds. Specifically, this chapter aims to present a prototype for how EE can be adapted to expand the delivery of timely, accurate climate change mitigation and adaptation interventions.

Background

The accelerating pace of scientific development means that most Americans outside the scientific community will learn the majority of their science after they leave formal schooling (Miller, 2010). However, despite efforts to improve scientific literacy and knowledge of environmental issues, literacy in these areas remains consistently low in the United States (National Science Board, 2020). While formal science education provides a solid base for the public understanding of science, it is insufficient for addressing rapid shifts in information acquisition due to emerging technologies and accelerated changes in scientific knowledge (Pew Research Center, 2015). Developing new mechanisms for the public to encounter opportunities for engaging with such knowledge is critically important, especially with regard to climate change (Cintron-Rodriguez et al., 2021). The cultural integration of science throughout interrelated media forms can build evidence-based discourse around scientific topics. While observing the exponential growth of scientific advancement and the linear cultural integration of scientific work, I became curious about how we could develop better systems to improve the cultural integration of science. I began exploring what mechanisms might help us better achieve these goals.

When I started scoping this work in 2015, it began expansively open-ended. I was curious about how to adapt established EE practices for climate communication. I didn’t have a specific narrative goal in mind for the series and was curious about how narrative and scripted media could be used as a tool for advancing climate communication. I spent a year scoping the work through literature reviews and in-depth conversations with leading researchers and practitioners in both EE and climate change communication, and then worked with a team to apply for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advancing Informal STEM Learning grant (Coren, n.d.). Just as we submitted our application in 2016, the federal government shifted away from climate communication. With a lack of federal support for a climate communication program of this scale at that time, I started to reach out to colleagues in Hollywood to see what could be done to move the work along privately. What I learned in that exploration was that an academic proposal wasn’t useful within the media industry and that it needed to be already scripted to advance those conversations. So, I took the NSF proposal and converted it into a scripted narrative with a working title, Rhythm and Glue. The title Rhythm and Glue represents the two main characters, Sarah represents “Rhythm” for the music that she loves and Jessica represents “Glue” for her skills at building with whatever odds and ends are available to repair her community. It’s also a double meaning in that when we are making sustainability improvements it’s easier and more fun with literally a little music and community repair skills.

While I haven’t yet succeeded at getting a program on the air, what I did do was to scope the work and build a prototype for a show. This is still useful for climate communication as a community as we continue to expand on applied work. I’m hoping that it is a practical guide for many communities to adapt narrative content for effective climate communication. In the years since I began this exploration, I see so much promise for expansion. I’m hoping to share enough of the process for it to be applicable in any narrative format for any audience segment. I see the screenwriting community uncertain about how to incorporate climate change in narrative media. While I strongly believe that these shows should be written by professional screenwriters, I hope that this prototype creates a functional example to overcome some of the most common challenges. Although not yet fully realized, I’m beginning to see how we might automate EE as a process for providing better public health coverage for communities.

For each topic, I’ll give an overview of what the team that I worked on the NSF proposal with learned and then a specific example from the Rhythm and Glue prototype. I’ll review audience segmentation for character development, story settings, visualizing positive outliers, using an agency for designing the narrative structure, transmedia experience, and program evaluation. Structured as a comedy drama series on television, Rhythm and Glue highlights the day-to-day realities of climate change facing residents of the United States, and role models realistic solutions and behaviors that citizens can take to mitigate those effects, for themselves and their communities. The story emphasizes personal and collective efficacy, including layered examples of how climate change is already affecting the health of Americans. Designed as a serial comedy drama, Sarah and Jessica, two female twenty-somethings in Los Angeles humorously grow into adults as they learn to collaborate while sharing their skill sets to build a better city that they both deeply care about. Slapstick, romantic entanglements, and career advancement anchor the story, while real-time audience participation drives engagement with climate topics.

One of the components of this project that sets Rhythm and Glue apart from other climate-related content is interactivity with its audience, where audience input shapes the story’s conflicts and resolutions. Real-time audience participation facilitates a national conversation about how we can collaborate to mitigate climate change. As an entertainment product, this show provides a model for transitioning sustainable urban transportation internationally and a model for facilitating a national conversation with a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This media platform example connects viewers with a network of nonprofit organizations supporting actionable behaviors that the audience can take locally to mitigate climate change. Content creation is advised by a team of subject experts and iterative research. Audience participation facilitates engagement, building a community base, and increasing the capacity of existing climate mitigation programs. Each season presents an overarching climate change issue. Season One tackles transportation and the current health effects of climate change, with subsequent seasons addressing energy, water, food, and waste (For the full prototype, see Coren, n.d.). This is what we learned….

Character Development

I wrote these character examples as a hybrid of Global Warming’s Six Americas audience segmentation tools (Chryst et al., 2018; Maibach et al., 2011) developed by Yale and George Mason University teams and demographic data based on Los Angeles at the time it was written. Global Warming’s Six Americas audience segmentation tools break audiences into six groups: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive. The proportion of these groups varies both regionally and over time. The Yale and George Mason University teams continually update and improve these models and you can search for your regional location and see how the trends are changing over time. Proportionally, the Alarmed group has increased in size since I originally wrote this prototype. Additionally, I did my best to highlight STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) representation across the character set. Each of the characters features intentionally intersectional social identities. There were early production conversations about relative cast size and production costs that influenced the character choices that are written into this example.

These are the Rhythm and Glue character examples:

• Sarah a is computer programmer who feels her emotions through music (Figs. 2, 4, and 5). Even typing her fingers on her keyboard and the wheels clicking around on her bicycle provide a soothing rhythm to her. Sarah and Jessica are childhood best friends currently living together as housemates. Sarah is quiet and reluctant to change, she wants consistency. She’s a 25-year-old African American asthmatic cyclist. In subsequent seasons, through professional development, she becomes a specialist in computer automation, and conflict resolution training initiated by her conflict with Jose helps her develop stronger interpersonal skills, both skills combined help her grow into a good manager despite her ambivalence to becoming one. She represents the Concerned group regarding climate change (as represented by Global Warming’s Six Americas). She is convinced that global warming is a serious problem, but while she supports a vigorous national response, she is distinctly not very involved, at least at the beginning of this series.

• Jessica is a Latinx registered nurse in her mid-twenties who loves to fix things (Figs. 2, 3, 4, and 5). In her free time, she’s perpetually taking old scraps and making new, beautiful things out of them. She is particularly good at loudly expressing frustration with something but then laughing her way through solving it. When she looks back at situations that she thought were problems, she only mentions the good things that she learned from the experience. She’s sunny even when things don’t work. After becoming increasingly concerned about public health through her experiences with Sarah’s asthma and various patients at her medical practice in later seasons, she earned a Master’s degree in Public Health and began working at the State Health Department. In Season 1, she learns to bike in a city, representing the transitioning character in Sabido methodology. She is Cautious about climate change. She believes that global warming is a problem, but she doesn’t view it as a personal threat and doesn’t feel a sense of urgency to deal with it.

• Jose is a graduate student with an infectious sense of humor who loves cooking and growing food (Figs. 4 and 5). Having grown up on his parent’s almond farm, he studied economics as an undergrad to try to find a practical skill. He is now working on his Master’s degree in Sustainability at UCLA, trying to figure out how to combine some sort of practical economics with his love of food and being outdoors. In Season 1, he’s so overwhelmed by school and work responsibilities that he deflects his remaining energy into video games, tanking his romantic relationship with Sarah. In Season 3, as an apology to Sarah, he builds her a community garden, so she can spend more time outside while she’s home. It works and they move on to organize a CSA delivery program in their neighborhood. Like Sarah, he’s Concerned about climate change, but not actively doing anything about it.

• Daniel is a young professional electrician and physical laborer (Figs. 4 and 5). He’s energetic, likes to tinker and build machines, and is skilled at modifying electrical and mechanical systems. He’s perpetually moving and good at getting the things around him moving too. He’s Disengaged with climate change. He hasn’t thought much about the issue at all. His electrical work and building skills lead to tinkering with renewable energy in their homes in Season 2: Energy, which later leads him to start a company installing solar panels.

• Andy, Josh, and Matt are casual friends living in another apartment in Sarah and Jessica’s complex (Figs. 3 and 5). They are a little like the coffee-drinking/break-room aliens from Men in Black, only they drink beer, not coffee. They are frequently playing drinking games (beer-pong, croquet, barbecuing competitions, etc.) in the courtyard of the apartment complex. They represent the Doubtful perspective on climate change with different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved in anything climate change-related. Andy stands out as particularly funny and an effective social organizer.

• Roger is the grumpy, misanthropic neighbor in the apartment complex. He provides both conflict and comic relief (Figs. 3 and 5). Roger is retired and belongs to the 1950’s American dream. He finds disappointment in what everyone else is doing. He followed the rules he was taught to succeed but the world changed and he’s trapped between an ideal that no longer exists and a reality that he doesn’t know how to be a part of. Roger likes old cars, sports, and listening to the radio. Conflict arises between him and many of the neighbors. Roger is Dismissive of climate change. He’s very sure it is not happening and is actively involved in opposing a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a caricature of the position, he’s very loud with his opinions, frequently spouting inaccurate information that is sometimes believed by Josh or Matt.

• Elizabeth “Liz” is a work friend of Jessica’s. She’s a Latinx medical assistant, amiable, slight, untidy, and disorganized (Fig. 5). She wears thick, cute dark-rimmed glasses and old comfortable sneakers. She’s very empathetic to her patients, but maybe not so patient with Stephanie. She’s Alarmed about climate change. She’s fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and is already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. As a caricature of the Alarmed position, she’s annoyingly involved and bossy in social causes. She’s always doing marches and suggesting things for everyone else to do. Her initially antagonistic stance toward social activism eventually proves a useful resource to Jessica because she’s a well of information. She helps Jessica navigate the hurdles to participation in sustainability topics as Jessica gradually gains interest in them as well.

• Stephanie is another friend of Jessica’s at work. She’s also a medical assistant and is the counterpoint to Liz (Fig. 5). However, detail-oriented Stephanie is particularly good at phlebotomy and untangling administrative/insurance problems. Jessica and Liz refer to her for help drawing blood or fixing administrative glitches. She’s kind, happy, and overtly materialistic. Tall and a little pudgy, she overcompensates for being self-conscious about her weight by dressing up too much. Stephanie is Disengaged with regard to climate change. She likes dancing, drinking, and shoes more than the planet. Conflicts arise between Stephanie and Liz about values and disagreements about consumerism and social activism.

EE characters are often categorized as positive, negative, or transitional characters relative to the intended behavior change. I recommend a modification of that in climate sector entertainment-education to make all characters either positive or transitional, omitting the negative role because we cannot leave people behind in this work (Fig. 1). Story conflicts that begin with negative characters can eventually become transitional characters over time. New story conflicts can be woven in by adding characters that represent new stakeholder groups, emotional, and technical challenges while still allowing the fictional communities to gain cumulative progress. Sarah and Jessica’s relationship with Roger begins as antagonistic but gradually warms. They gradually realize that Roger is grouchy because he’s lonely and needs social connection. As they develop empathy for him, they find shared goals for their building complex such as adding rooftop solar, even though they have different initial motivations for wanting the solar panels installed with Roger prioritizing energy independence over environmental goals. This recommendation gives both people and characters room to grow.

Fig. 1

Character types in entertainment-education programs, modified for climate communication toward positive and transitional characters

Story Settings

The stories in Rhythm and Glue are set in the present day and focus on current climate actions. Climate adaptation is the largest, fastest set of cultural transformations required in human history. Stories set in the future will lose the detail of optimizing present moment solutions emerging daily. Instead of jumping into a hypothetical future, I encourage you to stay in the present. The residential setting was selected as an apartment complex in Los Angeles with a courtyard supporting intergenerational interactions. The occupational settings of the main characters were selected to showcase a variety of sectors all actively adapting to climate solutions, namely, Jessica works in a healthcare setting, Sarah works in a tech office, Jose works in the agricultural sector, and Daniel works on electrification. The residential setting was selected as a mechanism to illustrate a place where different demographic groups would interact. The medical setting was chosen to illustrate the health impacts of climate change in various subpopulations. As a science communication product, I would answer to the question, “If we optimized narratives to have the largest constructive difference we can make right now?”: Set your story here and now in any present-day community, take the climate mitigation and adaptation work already being done, and include it in your story. Collecting local climate goals and building them into storylines by visualizing positive outliers is possible. Collecting crowdsourced geotagged images and stories through an interactive web-based ArcGIS tool called Story Maps (see details in the chapter by Wolf-Jacobs et al., 2024), images of local positive examples of climate engagement sources from community members can be collected and updated in real time. These citizen science-led crowdsourced examples of climate engagement can be used to identify and amplify existing community behaviors that support climate mitigation and adaptation and connect community members to existing programs.

Concept Art

As I got into the story development process, I commissioned concept art through an illustration firm. It was surprising to me how much reference material it took to generate anything close to a representational image set. And, stock art just didn’t cut it. I observed lots of details in person that were not visible from search results and web research. A goal of this work is to identify and amplify existing community behaviors that are already in progress and to connect with viewers to those projects and each other for amplifying that work. Adapting to climate change is the fastest global set of cultural changes that humans have ever made. Positive Deviance (also referred to as Positive Outliers or Bright Spots) analyses can help communities to identify existing community solutions to complex challenges and to amplify “what’s working?” (Buscell et al., 2014; Pascale et al., 2010; Singhal & Durá, 2017). Automating this process will not just be useful to writers but is potentially useful across all media types. Behavioral solutions may include improvements to electrification infrastructure, transitions to renewable energy sources, local food consumption, transitions to active and public transit, and advocacy for improvements in climate and health policies. There are a lot of possible behavioral interventions for climate, and tailoring communications strategies to local community needs is an area that we have room to improve. Using digital data sources in the systematic identification and understanding of positive outliers in various domains is beginning to be explored (Albanna et al., 2022). Experimentation is also beginning with ArcGIS as a tool to provide meaningful details for concept art, storyboarding, etc. to improve the regional and cultural nuances in real time (Coren & Myers, 2021). Automating this as a process through a GIS tool can help in codifying regional and demographic examples for a more systematic approach to identifying and amplifying the positive outlier examples will be useful across all media types to improve the delivery of accurate community-based reference material. Building a process that moves in real time with communities to identify and amplify positive outliers for climate mitigation and adaptation behaviors will improve our rate of response to environmental public health challenges. Figures 2, 3, 4, and 5 are examples of concept art developed for Rhythm and Glue.

Fig. 2

(Left to right: Sarah and Jessica) Sarah and Jessica explore Los Angeles together on bicycles, representing transitions to active transportation with climate and health co-benefits

Fig. 3

(Left to right: Roger, Jessica, Andy, Josh, and Matt) Andy, Josh, and Matt play beer pong in their apartment courtyard. Roger scolds them for the noise and clutter. In Season 1, there are air quality and health plotlines that play off of the social dynamics between Roger and the younger characters within the apartment complex setting

Fig. 4

(Left to right: Sarah, Jose, Daniel, and Jessica) Jose and Daniel join Sarah and Jessica at their apartment to drink and play music in the evenings. The Music Party Scene in Episode 9 is behavioral modeling of social support and community building

Fig. 5

(Left to right: Roger, Josh, Sarah, Jose, Daniel, Andy, Jessica, Liz, Stephanie) Concept art for the main ideas in Season 1: Transportation. This illustration shows each of the characters using different types of multimodal transportation. Jessica, Stephanie, and Liz are out for a walk on a lunch break. Jose is driving for a rideshare. Daniel is riding a cargo bike with a trailer of tools for work. Andy is riding a city bikeshare. Josh is riding an electric bus

Plotlines

EE programs often have a specific focus behavior target. In the formative research stages, the behavioral interventions are defined. For widespread application, I would like to see a systemization of the formative and summative evaluation stages to improve the rate of development of EE programs. In the climate sector, for each community, multiple parallel behavior change strategies must be sub-targeted for community variability. The trend overall in the story should use an Agency frame, using iterative goal setting to teach characters the skills they need to do at individual and collective levels. A simplified chart of agency as a story structure is in Fig. 6, it can be used as guidelines in narrative development to set character goals.

Fig. 6

Agency as a story structure. Stories should use iterative goal setting as a plot tool to socially model agency at both individual and collective levels. Have the characters set short-term and long-term goals and periodically re-evaluate them to reach their long-term goals

Story Arcs

These are descriptions of the story arcs for the first five seasons of the Rhythm and Glue prototype.

Season 1: Transportation

Jessica learns to bike in Los Angeles to reduce the amount of time that she’s stuck sitting in traffic. Sarah, who is living in the same apartment complex as Jessica and is already an avid bicyclist, teaches her all of the skills that she needs through the transition to active transportation. Sarah and Jose begin the story dating but conflicts arise between them. Jessica starts the season single, meets Daniel when he stops to help her with her bicycle and they begin casually dating. Jose is in school studying agriculture, and goofing off a lot on the side. In the season finale, at a New Year’s party, Sarah and Jessica go for a run and Sarah has a scary asthma attack. Jessica saves her life by sharing her inhaler.

Season 2: Energy

Sarah and Jose break up. Sarah pours herself into her work and learns machine automation. Daniel tries to impress Jessica. Daniel and Jessica construct electric artwork together, which leads them to tinker with renewable energy in their homes. A comedy of errors ensues, such as problems with costs, permitting, etc. There are many group discussions about appliance energy efficiency, engineering, and efficient power generation. Jessica fails at biking to work and relapses to using her car, later overcoming it and becoming an advocate for urban biking. While in school Jose learns about climate change affecting food supply and moves from Concerned to Alarmed, he finally takes school seriously. Daniel starts off disengaged with renewable energy but thinks the tinkering is fun; he gets discouraged by repeated failures. As he gains experience and gets plenty of encouragement from Jessica, he gradually becomes more confident and advocates for renewable energy and electrification updates.

Season 3: Food

Jose finishes school and gets a job. Jose builds a community garden to win back Sarah’s affection. Sarah and Jose work together to organize an automated Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) delivery with local farms. Jessica sees further public health benefits from improved nutrition, lower air pollution, increased exercise, and fewer insect disease vectors. She gets frustrated that she can’t do more to improve public health from her current job and goes back to school for her Master’s in Public Health. Daniel goes back to school too, to study business. They see less and less of each other and gradually drift apart. Jessica starts flirting with a new classmate. Jessica and Daniel break up.

Season 4: Water

Watering the garden and increasing city drought and watering restrictions bring up water conservation and find growing efficiency issues for Sarah, Jose, and Jessica. This leads to a larger conversation of municipal water supply being fragmented and the importance of managing it as a society. Jessica is now dating her classmate. They like each other, but they don’t have enough interests to stay together. Jessica begins to work in public health. Because of Sarah’s success with machine automation, she gets promoted. Sarah gradually gains confidence as a manager. Jessica’s art gets recognition. At the gallery opening, Daniel comes and they reunite.

Season 5: Waste

Jessica is offered a residency for her work with recycled objects at the dump. As a result of the residency, she becomes sensitive to the amount of waste in society. Sarah/Jose and Jessica/Daniel are all happy couples; they team up constructively to figure out the engineering challenges. As a result of the project, Sarah and Jessica learned a lot about city planning. Daniel starts a company installing solar panels. Jessica needs help with civics because she’s overwhelmed by the art residency, public health clinic and biking, city planning, and compost projects. Daniel is too busy with his new business to help her so she commiserates about it with Sarah, who steps up to the challenge. With Jessica’s encouragement, Sarah runs for the local office.

Story Engine

One of my goals in Rhythm and Glue is to facilitate a national conversation about transitions to civic sustainability through the microcosm of the show. The pilot sets up the basic story and establishes the characters. All further content has two sections:

• 1. Fixed story checkpoints, mostly revolving around the character’s romantic entanglements and Sarah and Jessica’s career advancement.

• 2. Flexible storylines that incorporate audience participation through transmedia elements (stories connected across platforms and formats and interlinked with live community programs). These areas give the audience an opportunity to share their successes and frustrations with climate change mitigation activities. These sections mostly relate to social and engineering challenges experienced by show viewers. Through nonprofit partnerships, we planned to increase participation in existing climate change mitigation programs and to identify existing bottlenecks to social-environmental change. By interspersing these two elements, it’s an architecture that allows for narrative character development, while still supporting a real-time national dialogue.

Collective Efficacy

Below is a visual example of how plotlines woven together through different character perspectives can increase the visualization of behavioral skill building for a range of skills in parallel. For example, I don’t wait to build on health impacts and health interventions in a clinical setting for completing a story modeling active transit skills. I’m building them together within different story settings on ABCD tracks (Fig. 7). I used foreshadowing liberally in the first few seasons of the show to set up health interventions in later seasons. I broke the social–emotional skills into blocks that developed throughout all five seasons. While there are individual setbacks and frustrations as plot points, the character and community building trends increase cumulatively over the length of the show, visualizing collective agency through narrative (Fig. 8).

Fig. 7

Here is a detailed example of the Season 1 plotlines in Rhythm and Glue. Story A—Jessica gets frustrated with city traffic and, with Sarah’s help, learns about active transportation. Sarah, already an avid bicyclist, helps her figure out the nuances of biking in a big city. Along the way, Jessica builds a relationship with Daniel. Story B—Sarah and Jose’s relationship implodes as their work stresses increase and they lack effective communication and stress management strategies. Story C—In a medical office, Liz and Stephanie debate overconsumption. Medical cases in the office highlight the relationships between climate and health. Liz increases her peer group’s participation in civics. Story D—Roger feels lonely and discouraged. His smoking and criticism irritate his community

Fig. 8

Over a five-season story arc there is a net community skill gain over time. As the community gradually builds skills, you can see the agency and the skills improve. While there are individual setbacks and frustrations as plot points, the character and community building trends increase cumulatively over the length of the show, visualizing collective agency through narrative

Season 1 Story Arc

• A Story: Jessica is learning active transportation, biking, and dating Daniel. Jessica wants to add a new electronic dimension to her artwork by learning how to solder. When she misses an opportunity through an art museum workshop, due to city traffic, she gets really frustrated. Already an avid bicyclist, Sarah helps Jessica figure out the nuances of biking in a big city. Jessica sees the warmth that Sarah and Jose have together and is appalled by her apparent dating options. She pines for the kind of relationship that Sarah and Jose share, full of shared interests. Roger, their misanthropic neighbor, is jealous of his cat Mini’s affection for Jessica and Sarah. Roger perpetually heckles boisterous Andy, Matt, and Josh as they play in the quad. Bicycling leads Jessica to a romance with Daniel. She is pleasantly surprised to find Daniel is a collaborator with a complementary skill set. They both like making things with their hands, and Daniel is able to add the electricity to her art that she was hoping to learn, while she adds purpose and color to his tinkering. Roger gets annoyed by the accumulating bicycles parked in shared areas as he repeatedly trips over them. When biking, Jessica gets hit by a car, she’s afraid to get back onto a bicycle. Jessica spends so much time stuck in traffic that she’s practically living in her car. A comedic navigation error with a GPS leads her back to a bike path that she fondly remembers with Daniel. She hesitantly regains her confidence in biking, ultimately becoming an advocate for improved bicycle parking in her community by asking for more bike parking at their apartment complex.

• B Story: Sarah and Jose share a love of cooking and music. Jose cooks for Sarah, who in turn helps him prepare for the catering that supplements his student income. Sarah’s rosy relationship with Jose deteriorates as her stress increases due to work and asthma. Her boss makes a series of ill-conceived choices: selling questionable software, switching databases, and hiring a Chief Security Officer who comically locks down everything in the office. Sarah’s chronic asthma is exacerbated by Roger’s cigarette smoke blowing into her bedroom window. The coffee machine at Sarah’s office breaks repeatedly as a comic gag, and she just can’t seem to get a break or even a cup of coffee. Jose himself is overwhelmed by his work driving for Uber, catering, and school assignments. Jose, seeking relaxation from his many commitments, gets pulled into the video games that Josh, Andy, and Matt are playing downstairs. The video games divert his attention away from Sarah and their relationship suffers. Andy provides empathy and restful space for Sarah when she’s stressed. The finale is a Naked New Year’s party full of wild party games and tons of alcohol. At the party, Sarah and Jessica leave drunk to go running and Sarah has a major asthma attack, but her inhaler is lost. Jessica helps her home narrowly saving her life by sharing her inhaler with her friend. Jose is yet again distracted by video games and not there for Sarah when she needs him and they break up. Jessica consoles Sarah. Season One ends with a circuit overload at the New Year’s party causing a power outage. Jessica and Daniel comically open up the wall together to repair the damage, leading us into the Season 2 topic: Energy and power infrastructure.

Community Building

Social skills training is embedded in the design of Rhythm and Glue that extends beyond the character and setting design and is globally applicable in building resilient social structures that apply to all genres. Modeling behavioral strategies for community building through media is a way for us to build community resilience by deepening and interconnecting social ties. I’ll focus here on building social cohesion and increasing collective efficacy. Climate change threatens psychological health as well as physical well-being (Crimmins et al., 2016; Frumkin et al., 2008; Luber & Lemery, 2015). Building emotional resilience and social cohesion to lower the risk of negative mental health impacts of climate change (Coren & Safer, 2020; Hikichi et al., 2016) becoming a network intervention layer within public health intervention. Rapid anthropogenic change is also increasing population mobility and resettlement globally (Torres & Casey, 2017). Supportive community social ties (i.e., community social cohesion) serve as a source of resilience in the context of protracted and acute disasters (Torres & Casey, 2017). Improved social cohesion is protective of mental health outcomes (Hikichi et al., 2016) and improved social cohesion can be healing post disasters (Wickrama & Wickrama, 2011), therefore establishing and normalizing a set of cultural practices that build and maintain community social ties, improves population resilience, and adaptation to climate change and mental health outcomes. As people move around more frequently because of instability issues, people don’t have as long to develop and maintain relationships; therefore, it becomes increasingly important that we be able to build trusting relationships quickly to provide the necessary social services. To improve social cohesion, we need to increase the density of social ties and increase the rate at which we form them. Resilient community structures have an infrastructure that holds its place even when people move away or transfer between project roles. This helps long-term projects persist through administrative and funding changes by providing community anchors. Social structures are dendritic. Improving the frequency of social nodes and the interconnection between them improve both individual and community health. Reconnecting and strengthening social ties may increase resilience and buffer some of the adverse mental health impacts of climate change. Unifying and normalizing a set of behavioral skills for community social support was an intentional strategy built into the story design of Rhythm and Glue. The quality of the relationships in the community provided support for each community member as they learned new skills and experienced emotional challenges. Sarah and Jessica’s relationship was a key design within the narrative; they are genuinely friends, with narrative representations of people demonstrating loyalty and trust, and doing what they say they’re going to do. I want to flag this because many of the shows that I see on television at the moment have a premise of fear and mistrust. Anecdotally, I notice a lot of plotlines creating social rifts just for the entertainment drama of it. There’s a way to show community building with plenty of plot and action that still shows empathy and cumulative community building over time. Providing concrete examples of trusting behavior can also support the social justice issues that perpetuate through media as we begin to repair harms from systemic environmental justice policies and air quality-related health disparities such as redlining (EPA, 2022).

In Rhythm and Glue, I intentionally started with an emotionally bonded set of characters, Sarah and Jessica. I established at the very beginning of the series that they were close long-term friends. The newer relationships in the show, such as the romantic attachment with Daniel, were built during the onscreen narrative. Sarah and Jose’s break-up in the first season leads to emotional growth for Sarah in developing new social-emotional skills and then being able to apply those new skills in professional contexts. These were intentional story choices to provide a range of skill levels at social-emotional skill-building and to provide a context within the story to teach emotional resilience. I’m currently using the nonviolent communication training practice to teach empathy as a skill (Rosenberg, 2015). The basic pattern for the nonviolent communication training is Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request. Observation is what you see or hear. Feelings and Needs are sub-defined sets (Rosenberg, Marshall, 2021). Requests can be for an action, for example, “Please add bike lanes to my street,” or for connection, “Would you please reflect on what you heard me say?” I like teaching with this set because the structured pattern of the feelings and needs lists makes emotional communication into a concrete skill for educational purposes. In this context, I’m defining care as an action, not a feeling, as in the act of participating in social care. A strong emphasis was placed on the quality of character engagement by socially modeling pro-social care. Higher network cohesion improves community resiliency. Many climate behavioral interventions are aimed at individual-level behavior change. I include community resiliency overall as a behavioral target, including social cohesion and emotional skill-building.

There are many kinds of network interventions using social network data to accelerate behavior change (Centola, 2010; Hunter et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2015; Valente, 2012). Alteration network interventions (Hunter et al., 2019) support the addition of new members and ties to social networks and are particularly helpful in community resilience support for increasing social cohesion. Practices for building and maintaining social networks will improve community health outcomes as populations move due to an increasing number of direct and indirect stressors from climate change. Social modeling of these social skills provides a unified cultural reservoir for supporting social infrastructure. In recognition of the impacts of climate change on psychological well-being, climate mitigation and adaptation strategies should include a set of shared, unified cultural practices and behaviors that support mental health and community building. As communities experience trauma and migrate, having these cultural skills normalized across a wide range of existing social norms will support both healthier communities now and less fractured communities adjusting to changing environmental conditions. Climate change isn’t limited to a single behavioral health intervention but many in parallel (electrification, food consumption patterns, transportation changes). As the climate destabilizes mental health, community building and emotional resilience interventions being culturally normalized might yet become deeply important behavioral interventions.

Suggestions for social support behaviors that can be modeled through media include:

• Investments in enhancing community cohesion such as formal check-ins, buddy systems, and network building (Torres & Casey, 2017). Building and maintaining relationships both physically and remotely.

• Social ties facilitating the exchange of resources (e.g., food, shelter) and information (e.g., early warnings regarding environmental risks) can increase the likelihood of disaster preparedness (Torres & Casey, 2017). For example, people joining or hosting community meals or questions like, “Do you need assistance finding housing? Here, let me show you where to find housing in our community.”

• Including people displaced by climate change under international refugee law and providing structured pathways for political and social integration into destination societies (Torres & Casey, 2017).

• Providing psychological first aid as an initial disaster response intervention with the goal of promoting safety, stabilizing survivors of disasters, and connecting individuals to help and resources. Psychological first aid assists community members assess the immediate concerns and needs of an individual in the aftermath of a disaster. Increasing the cultural normalization of psychological first aid will help community members assist each other in responding to environmental disasters more effectively. A variety of training resources for psychological first aid is available at the American Psychological Association site (American Psychological Association, 2022) and Coursera (2022).

In social network interventions in public health, the majority of studies focus on the spread of messages across networks. In addition to including that in our future designs for climate communication messaging, I’m proposing that network interventions that build social ties throughout a network improving the density of social support are itself a resilience adaptation (Fig. 9). We need to be teaching community behavioral strategies that improve both the quality of relationships and the density of social connections.

Fig. 9

This is a visual representation of a social system of 40 people moving from a sparsely connected social network to a more densely connected social network. In this illustration, the dots represent people and the gray lines represent the relationships between them

Transmedia Extensions

Transmedia storytelling is a process where key story elements in a fiction set are systematically incorporated across multiple media types, creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each story piece makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story (Jenkins, 2010). An example of transmedia storytelling is Star Wars. It starts with three films, then additional films then books, soundtracks, TV shows, games, and toys were produced to extend the story. The same story or threads of it persist across media types. When you connect with the Star Wars franchise universe, you’re not watching the same film in movie, book, and audio formats. The story is addictive. The story grows through different times and perspectives across media types, hence transmedia.

As the themes addressed in East Los High focused on reproductive health, the transmedia tools connect viewers to live pro-social programs, such as reproductive health services provided in-person through partnerships with Planned Parenthood, as well as safer sex education instructed by characters in pull-out videos such as Cece’s vlog (Wang & Singhal, 2016; Wang et al., 2019). The narrative then connected viewers across media types and programs (Wang et al., 2019). Applying this methodology to a climate narrative for what I wrote starts with the main story arc for Rhythm and Glue as a television program. Then the story connects to place-based participatory programs as the connective tissue of sorts between them. Videos similar to the character-driven pull-out videos of East Los High have characters from Rhythm and Glue teaching relevant skills that need more elaboration or space than fit within the show’s main narrative. Examples could include Daniel teaching home electrification updates, Jessica teaching active transit skills such as basic bicycle maintenance or how to take your bike on public transit, or Liz and Stephanie teaching emergency health skills for climate and health impacts, such as how to install an air filter on your home to prepare for wildfire season.

The transmedia plan for Rhythm and Glue was planned to follow the structure of East Los High with a variety of nonprofits assisting with the on-the-ground participation for a range of active transit, electrification, and habitat restoration activities. The first season of the show was planned to focus on transportation, so National partners such as People for Bikes, League of American Bicyclists, and Green for All were combined with local/regional teams such as Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, Bike Coalition Philadelphia, Bike Austin, and the Washington Area Bicycle Association. At the time of our NSF submission over 50 organizations had signed on as partners. This was a heavy lift, as the production was a small independent production. There was reluctance on both the part of the media production industry partners to take on a program with this many educational components and there was also reluctance from the nonprofit partners for capacity reasons. While they were all enthusiastic about the premise and goals of the program, the nonprofit partners were universally experiencing their own capacity limitations. Financial support to pay for additional staff time would have been really helpful, though it was beyond the budget that my NSF proposal could cover.

When designing your transmedia interfaces please assess which groups are already doing work for your areas of interest topically and geographically. Listen for what is working for them and listen when your teammates and audiences start to share what’s working for them and where they will need capacity support. The content and format should be custom-designed for each intervention matching the intended audience’s tone, platform, and language preferences. National-level automation of the transmedia design and evaluation components would help reduce the workload on the production companies and nonprofits who want to participate in this program. It would lighten the load and improve the range and interconnection of participation.

Program Evaluation

Program Evaluation is a key component of an EE initiative. Before a show is written, there’s often an extensive research process to plan it out as a communications strategy. Once a show is written, there are focus groups and message testing. There’s iterative research that pairs with the entertainment product while it’s running and finally, there’s a summative evaluation to determine how successful the campaign was at meeting its goals. None of that has a place within the entertainment system. These evaluations are expensive and labor-intensive. If, as a science communication system, we provided these services tailored to the writers and producers, we could streamline this as a process and improve science and public health communication. Evaluation should be coordinated nationally through a centralized system. One of the things that I learned in the pitching process through conversations with entertainment industry leaders was that the depth of formative and summative evaluations, while necessary to make these entertainment-education and health communication projects are too heavy a lift for the production teams themselves. Providing it as a free, streamlined service would improve the adoption of these practices. I note that these methods are constantly improving, so again, centralizing it as a process would improve our collective efficiency in providing an evaluation plan for each show.

Science communication needs to be an iterative design process. I was looking forward to polling the audience for additional directions. I think the key questions to ask the audience are: (1) What do you want to know? (2) How would you like that information delivered? When I first envisioned this work, I hoped to choose a dozen or so different demographic sets of audiences that we’d like to connect with, repeating this entire process with each demographic set and then interweaving the stories like the story crossovers in the Marvel universe demonstrating regional variation examples for sustainability transitions in different locations. It would then have the potential to interconnect different regions’ adaptation and mitigation strategies as well as have the space to cross-intergenerational and cultural boundaries.

Engagement works better than deficit communications (Kearns, 2021). Deficit communication is providing people with additional information and expecting them to change their opinions and behaviors. Engagement communication styles are bi-directional, culturally nuanced, and more of an ongoing conversation with your target audiences (Holliman, 2009). There is also discussion within the arts communities that recommends building communities instead of building audiences (Borwick, 2012). Music as auditory communication also fosters community building skills (Higgins, 2012). Fitting science communication into existing industries as functional machinery involves flexibility and staff time for the science communication interface. It’s our job to design a system that works for and within the existing social norms of the sectors that we work across. Adding this as a permanent functional role within science communication should be funded permanently as a system update to support “mutual learning by publics and scientists” (McCallie et al., 2009). It should be a system-level design about where to structurally invest and how to coordinate to move information effectively across larger systems.

Future Directions

I hope that future work will build on this prototype. I would like to see the automation of components of the formative research process and image prototyping integrated into community action plans (Wolf-Jacobs et al., 2024). We should intentionally design planned entertainment-education programs for a statistically representative set of target audiences so that each community has representative behavioral modeling of how their community is adapting to climate change. Also, for the United States, an entertainment-education program’s evaluation and transmedia components seem to be too heavy to lift for the entertainment partners. If the US science agencies build a transmedia interface and support the formative and summative evaluation then the entertainment programs can “plug in” to the interface and join in where their capacity allows, making participation easier while increasing the accuracy and volume of narrative climate stories. This boundary space is tricky. It will involve deep, trusting partnerships within science agencies to support the infrastructure improvements for science communication and entertainment creatives to be willing to experiment in this shared space.

This chapter provides a toolset and an example for constructing narrative climate stories. Just to recap, characters should be demographically matched to your target audiences, and behavioral interventions should be modeled for multiple parallel targets by identifying existing community positive outliers. Social support behaviors for collective problem solving should be modeled by characters in all plotlines, regardless of the intervention topic. I expect there to be a tremendous amount of creativity and range in the execution of these stories; however, some basic guidelines might facilitate the accuracy of representation so that we can reach shared goals faster as a team. It also is likely to support writers who are interested in social impact stories to get the most impact out of whatever story they would like to tell.

Somewhere between the academic “shoulds” and a tangible plan to build a more robust science communication system, as next steps, I recommend:

• Funding the Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) work—Scaling this work will require a lot of consistent funding support for staff and programs, building this capacity for public health communication infrastructure is an investment for developing a more adaptive public health communication system that is long overdue.

• A national-level department staffed to coordinate the components of this system and to build a functionally supportive systemization to build and maintain an integrated entertainment-education program as a component of the existing public health communication system.

• I’d establish norms for choosing a representative set of communities and sampling positive outliers of climate adaptation in those regions. By refining our audience segmentation and sampling tools we’re also able to improve the visual storytelling of who exactly is doing what within their communities. While the geospatial tools are still nascent for this use, my recommendation from here would be to use regional and culturally demographically specific characters to build on regionally specific examples of climate action.

• Build partnerships with creatives to create a first set of entertainment-education programs and then deeply evaluate to learn what works and what needs modification.

• While the art products that we generate need to be unique and targeted, the systems that we use to build them can be automated as a process. This would substantially reduce the cost, time, and accuracy barriers.

I think that we need to automate the formative evaluation steps and provide more concrete examples of audience engagement with climate solutions. Due to the increase in technological opportunities, I’m optimistic that we have the technological capacity to automate and coordinate these programs. Despite the scale of the impacts of climate health outcomes, funding this work has been difficult. I’m hopeful that the emerging Action for Climate Empowerment work continues to draw together the capacity to make this work a reality.

We need to be building a coordinated system of messaging across fields originating with community-centered input. There is no one perfect message in climate communication;, we need coordination and accuracy to improve a lot of different kinds of communication assets. As technical criteria, climate communication needs to be bi-directional and designed to meet the communication preferences of the people receiving the messages. In addition to better supporting the groups as communities of practice, we would benefit from a more structured toolset for the coordination of multidisciplinary work. Due to the rapid technological development of geospatial and network intervention tools, we should be pairing those tools with art and communications strategies to develop a systemization of content creation that meets community needs. In Fig. 10, I’m proposing a mechanism to improve the coordination of messaging across regional needs and media types. By “tightening the loops” in this coordination of climate messaging model, we can reduce lag time and improve accuracy across the media landscape.

Fig. 10

Coordination of climate messaging first within a region, and then across media types (journalism products, and scripted television)

Technology sector work involves automation that needs to be applied in the civil sector where much of the climate change activism messaging originates. Network analysis can facilitate collective efficacy visualizations, using storytelling to help individuals to see the roles they play over the larger system allowing them to focus on what they’re doing so they understand their roles without feeling so overwhelmed thereby improving climate anxiety outcomes. Camera placement should be at the level of individuals, modeling target behaviors. These should be combined with geospatial and network visualizations to show the relative placement of the activities. Time-lapse visualizations can be used to show the relative impacts of policy options. Auditory cues can be placed first modeled within narratives and then repeated in the physical settings where they occur in the stories to reinforce reminders of steps (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11

Defining the mapping, social “glue,” digital markers, and physical nudges components of this two-loop system proposal (Bouman et al., 2012; Davenhall & Kinabrew, 2011; Dreibelbis et al., 2016; Graham et al., 2011; Lutkenhaus, 2020; Lutkenhaus et al., 2019)

It is not enough for this work to be done piecemeal. At best that achieves patchy outcomes. Hiring trained artists in coordinated partnerships will take a level of financial support that I have not yet seen in my career. Yet, to achieve the UN sustainable development goals or other global tasks, we must. These jobs must meet or exceed industry-level professional requirements. To build a workforce in science communication we need to advance beyond work for hire and institutional public relations positions, it will mean creating new coordination roles and paying staff better. These are highly skilled jobs and many of them involve multiple competencies across the arts and sciences.

Since writing this prototype, one of the most interesting advancements is the Action for Climate Empowerment work (Bowman et al., 2021; Bowman & Morrison, 2021; Cintron-Rodriguez et al., 2021). I hope that through that work we will be able to develop the infrastructure as a community to support the evaluation and development of many programs applying these ideas. In the meantime, I hope that this work is a useful tool for narrative communities exploring these ideas. I sincerely look forward to all of your ideas and stories. Please stay connected to each other as we refine these tools for all types of narrative practitioners.