as part of the xperimenters-cohort at science gallery bengaluru, the four of us were asked to present a public engagement project at the annual youth symposium. that year, the symposium was titled ‘hot & bothered’, and aimed to engage young people around the world in the global climate-crisis discourse.

we chose to steer away from traditional ‘scientific’ enquiries, and wished to do something with crowdsourced qualitative data; partly inspired by the work of guerilla science. so, we put up a small stall at a local event in bengaluru, and asked 200+ young adults to draw what they thought the earth would look like, 30 years into the future, given the current climate-crisis. each drawing was then manually analysed and the findings were shared at the symposium, in an attempt to reduce ‘climate-anxiety’ amongst the youth.

the responses we gathered turned out to be extremely diverse. some were grim — depicting the earth as a grand ball of fire — while others displayed belief in collective climate-positive-actions, such as renewable energy and sustainable consume choices. some placed their optimism in the abilities of tech-moguls, hoping that they would swoop in at the last minute with a giant water hose to cool down the earth, while others believed technology could achieve nothing more than enslaving human beings in the future (and, hence, climate wouldn’t matter anyway).

some of my favourite responses are below:

the first bit of analysis we performed was to tag each drawing based on its sentiment — was the drawing largely positive or negative? in some cases, we couldn’t judge or arrive at a consensus, and marked them as neutral.

as i engaged more with the drawings, i realised that each drawing could be summed up with a few keywords (such as trees, buildings, deforestation, et-cetera). so, we looked at each drawing and manually identified keywords and themes.

this became a rich starting point for computational imagery. i wondered what a ‘collective’ visual would look like, and fed the top 20 most frequently occurring keywords to open-access-ai-engines.

finally, during the symposium, we connected our findings to ‘climate-anxiety’ — a term coined by glenn albrecht to bucket heightened emotional and psychological distress to the globally worsening climate situation. the idea was to show young adults around the world that other people their age were feeling similar things, irrespective of their geographies. we ended our presentation by facilitating a discussion between viewers about coping mechanisms and prospective climate futures that the world may experience (and how we may prepare (emotionally) for the same).

acknowledgements:

worked with jyotsna, snehaja, and samyukta; mentored by vasudha and madhushree; at science gallery bengaluru.