Full-Circle: Group 6

Fire & Ice: An Immersive Experience

Group members: Ran Duan, Rohan Putatunda, Akila Sampath, Mark SubbaRao, Jianwu Wang

Fire & Ice is a personalized group immersive experience. These type of experiences have proved to be quite popular: the travelling exhibit “The Van Gogh Immersive Experience” travelling exhibition has hosted more than 5 million visitors since 2017. There are also now permanent exhibition venues to hold these type of exhibits. For example ARTECHOUSE has facilities in Washington D.C., New York, Miami, and Houston, which are capable of hosting this type of content and has shown an interest in hosting content at the interface of art and science.

The large immersive space will create a sense of awe and connection. We will utilize the power of the immersive experience to make information that may seem remote more immediate and to help building empathy with those facing climate disasters. For example we will put you in the path of a raging wildfire, or in a field that had perviously been the location of a glacier.

The key innovation of this project will be they way in which content is personalized towards the visitors. At the start of the experience we will collect (voluntary) demographic information about the visitors (e.g. first name, birth year, home town, ages of children, profession, interests) which will determine the nature of the experience. We will dynamically pull information from historical datasets, near realtime datasets, and climate models to generate personalized facts that will be displayed on the walls of the experience: “When Mary was born carbon dioxide levels were at 350 parts per million, right now they are at 425 parts per million and rising”, “When Ran’s children are her age we expect the number of days Summer days with dangerous heat to double in their hometown of Reno, Nevada”.

The target audience for this experience will be parents. One key message of the personalized information will be how the impact of climate change will fall disproportionally on future generations. This message will resonate with parents as care for your children is a universal human value. This generation is also has the potential to immediately impact climate action and policy (compared to children, young adults, or seniors). Every show will be unique experience co-created with the audience.

The experience will be framed around Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” which touched on themes of climate change. However the descriptions of the experience and the marketing material will avoid an explicit mention of climate change in order to avoid turning away audiences who are not receptive to a climate change message.

Climate Phenomenon

Reduced Sea Ice Cover
Enhanced Warm Air Advection by the LOW
Exacerbated Hot/Dry Fire Conditions by the HIGH
- dry conditions, which can exacerbate drought and increase the risk of wildfires
Increased Heat Fluxes
- heat from the ocean to the atmosphere

Science Findings

This Nature paper [5] shows increasing large wildfires over the western United States are linked to diminishing sea ice in the Arctic. A possible reason is the Arctic-driven teleconnection through regional circulation changes with the poleward-shifted polar jet stream and enhanced fire-favorable surface weather conditions.
Paper [6] shows albedo and irradiance are possible ways how wildfires impact Glacier melt.
Paper [7] shows black carbon (BC) aerosols could be the reason linking Amazon wildfires on Antarctic sea ice.

Human Impact

Wildfires can cause respiratory issues, burns, and other health problems. The availability and accessibility of healthcare can be impacted by climate change itself.
Cultural norms and beliefs can influence how individuals and communities perceive and respond to climate change. This can affect adaptation strategies and the effectiveness of mitigation efforts.
Displacement, increased stress, and mental health challenges
Deforestation, unsustainable agriculture, and industrial pollution are major drivers
These activities also destroy natural habitats, leading to biodiversity loss and disrupting ecosystems

Human Contributor(s)

Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes, contribute to climate change
Reduced sea ice opens new shipping routes and makes resource extraction easier, leading to increased human activity in the Arctic
Sea ice loss makes oil extraction in the Arctic more feasible, leading to further exploitation of these resources

Communication Theories

Values theory – How and why do people value issues?
- To raise the concern/priority on climate change across the political spectrum
- We hope to increase people’s emphasis on desirability rather than feasibility aspects of climate change. This way, people will go beyond feasibility/efficacy/(in)convenience considerations of climate change and will be more willing to engage [7]
Extended parallel process model
- A lot of the issues in the current communication is that we focused on the threat without proper messaging on what to do about future. To fix this, we will focus on raising collective efficacy toward change. The environmental learning and science interest we promote through the exhibition will help promote efficacy, a much needed effort in climate communication. [8]
Metaphor and Gestalt theory [9]
- Metaphors contribute to the moral aspect of climate change and will help reframe the issue in terms of moral correctness, behavioral committment. We will use metaphor strategies in communication theory, bringing the scientific concept “sea ice melting” closer to home by linking it to immediate property loss, health impacts from climate-fueled wildfires.
- Synergistic effect of wildfire and glacier ice melting through scientific findings will be emphasized and will be used in visual metaphors.

Change Theories

Social identity theory
- Self-categorization approach: We want to encourage a more sustainable relationship with nature, and we want to personalize climate change using personal experience, individual stories, blending stories with data for a micro/macro level experience, invite participants to rethink the individual social identity, the relationship with and value towards nature, etc. [10]
Cultural worldviews
- Studies show that climate change requires global/abstract thinking, collective worldviews. With integration of data and individual stories, we aim to build up the new cultural perspectives towards family, community, promoting the sense of belonging and nature love. [11] [12]
Positive vs. negative emotions
- Studies show that awe, hope, and other newer positive emotions may help reinvent what climate change means. We will use these emotions in the exhibition to promote positive feelings about collective coping. Macro-level data in the current practice on climate data visualizations sometimes overwhelm the audience with hopelessness, fear, or abstractness. Our personalized data-driven approach attaches emotions from individual stories to the data, adding persuasive power. [13]

Evaluation strategies

Exit Survey

We will also ask participants to donate in an exit survey, measuring the amount of donations as a behavioral outcome.
We will integrate personal stories from museum visitors for follow-up community events, measure the number of visitors to the events, measure the number of views/likes on social media, and the increase (%) in behaviors (e.g. likes, hashtags, views) on social media over time. This information will be tracked in real time and will be displayed to the public at the exhibition to promote social norm and “peer influence.”
We will evaluate the information-seeking and interpersonal communication using follow-up surveys of our exhibition visitors and measure increases in discussion (e.g., word of mouth, information dissemination online/offline) in the long run.

Summary

What behavior does it want to change?

Engagement of the general public on climate-related media (story, study, fiction, movie, etc)

Why is it important?

Current communication gap on climate connection: Report [1] shows only 3.1% of online content mentioning climate change makes a connection to health-related impacts. Studies also show that connecting climate change to health will promote public engagement [2]. We believe communicating connections between different climate phenomena and their health impacts will help people care more about overall global climate change and climate phenomena in other locations.

Our innovations and why it could work?

Study [3] shows in-person interaction is important in behavior change.
Study [4] shows personalization plays a big role in digital intervention.

Impacts

If a person cares more about such climate connections, she is more likely to rank climate issues higher on her political concerns
When there is enough interest in the general public, public policy could change accordingly.