Test our Prototypes for Climate Communication
Climate communication: As a part of their course «Design for Media Use», Media and Interaction Design students developed six climate communication prototypes. Illustration: Kristin Eidsheim.
Vismedia publishes six innovative media designs made by students at the University of Bergen. You can test all six prototypes and read their accompanying specifications below.
Written by Lars Nyre, Andy Opel and Kristin Eidsheim.
In the spring of 2020 thirty students in Media City Bergen made prototypes of responsible ways to communicate climate information. This was the second part of a course where they also conducted critical evaluations of climate communication. Read more about the innovative course here.
Novel ideas
The student groups designed novel solutions for climate communication for the national broadcaster NRK and the company Scary Weather and their customers the Natural History Museum and Fløibanen AS.
The design prototypes show great variety in the use of aesthetic principles, rhetorical appeals and interactivity. They can all be further developed in collaboration with NRK and Scary Weather, or they can become the starting point for independent entrepreneurial projects.
The concepts and functionalities are valuable to journalists, climate communicators and the general public alike, and they are therefore published by Vismedia with consent from all the participating students.
It is unusual for exam reports to be published, but it would be unfortunate for high quality work to remain unavailable, and publication furthermore gives students a clear sense of ownership to their work. Knowing their work would be available to a public audience raised the bar for the students and resulted in strong work with a clear commitment to the projects.
The six prototypes
First, the collaborating media company is presented briefly, and then the students’ design projects are summarized. You can test all the prototypes and watch videos of how they work. To read the full specifications click on the icons. The reports are available in English and Norwegian.
Digital collaboration: Because of COVID-19 restrictions the student groups had to make due with online meetings for large parts of the semester. Top from the left: Paula Jee Ullaland and Emilie Munthe-Kaas. Bottom from the left: Ingfrid Daland Næss, Ida Ødegård and Eivind Gisholt.
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)
NRK is Norway's main public broadcasting service, financed by tax income to inform, educate and entertain the population. Like the BBC in Britain, NRK is supposed to produce content characterized by cultural and geographical diversity in a politically neutral way. NRK runs a number of radio and TV stations, as well as a large website (nrk.no). The contact for the MIX202 student projects was editor of the climate task force; Astrid Rommetveit.
Walkthrough-video of the prototype for «Climate dashboard – A user-friendly platform for reliable climate information».
Walkthrough-video of the prototype for «Climate calculator V. 2».
Scary Weather
Scary Weather is a media company that produces interactive installations and multimedia stories about weather and climate change. The company is responsible for a number of installations at the University of Bergen's Natural History Museum. CEO Ronald Toppe was the contact for the MIX202 student projects.
Walkthrough-video of the prototype for «The climate choice – A game where your everyday choices affect the globe».
Walkthrough-video of the prototype for «Bergen Climate Travel».
The value of innovation pedagogy
These six projects were led quite independently by the students themselves. While they did receive constructive criticism from teachers as well as industry collaborators, they often kept to their original ideas and were not afraid to stand their ground.
The groups employed a variety of digital tools to present climate information in new and engaging formats. Connecting climate to our daily habits and providing direct feedback to users is a theme throughout the projects as the students learned how to connect databases with app development and augmented reality.
The visibility of these projects beyond the classroom gave the students added incentive to work hard and produce work that could be shared well beyond the university setting. This is a significant feature of the innovation pedagogy model. The quality of the work supports the idea that student engagement with challenging social issues can be a major motivator and yield the kind of influential work that demonstrates the power and influence of a university experience.
The pedagogical team
The course leader for MIX202 was Professor Lars Nyre. Subject teachers were Professor Andy Opel (Florida State University), Senior Engineer Zulfikar Fahmy, PhD Fellow Fredrik Håland Jensen, PhD Fellow Oda Elise Nordberg and Master's Student Jonathan Lindø Meling. The evaluations were translated into English by Kristin Eidsheim.
Our contacts in the companies were chief editor Sigvald Sveinbjørnsson in the newspaper BA, journalist and leader of the task force for climate journalism Astrid Rommetveit in NRK, and media entrepreneur Ronald Toppe in Scary Weather.