Lanni Zhou | lannizhou@gmail.com
Case Study The Climate Change Debate project is one of my self-initiated projects. It discussed various reasons that caused almost 4 out of 10 Americans don't believe in climate change. My initial approach to this project was from a climate change believer’s standpoint, the design goal was to help climate change deniers to understand and believe climate change from their perspectives. However, after I researched more than 30 articles written by scientists, politicians and social activists and interviewed 9 Americans, I changed my design goal. Climate change debate isn't just a scientific issue but social and political issue. Based on research, I found that people's standpoint on climate change was affected by media manipulation, party polarization and culture cognition rather than scientific knowledge. The Media manipulates environmental information when people acquire for knowledge. The human society built based on trust. They obtain their scientific knowledge by consulting others who share values and whom they trust and understand. The polarized political climate in America leads polarization in Americans’ public opinion on the climate issue. When people are not clear about the certain political issue, they look at what political cues are given by their political leaders and media channels. In order to make voters vote for their policy, politicians frame environmental issue simpler and more homogenous to aline with the party value. The desktop research is aline with my user research finding. 75% of my interviewees, which includes both climate change believers and deniers, don't know what the greenhouse effect is. This indicates that they didn't look at climate change neutrally as a science topic but follow their social group's information cues. All those factors narrow down to one fundamental problem - bias. If we cannot minimize the bias between different social groups, the climate change debate may never reach its conclusion and our environment will continue to suffer because of human bias. In the end, instead of giving audiences a firm conclusion, I designed a participatory exhibition that demonstrates party bias and the potential common ground between different groups to the public. I included 2 video arts, a touchable screen, and a tag game. The 2 videos are made from many news clips; I used news clips to demonstrate how different media outlets and two sides - conservative and liberal - frame climate change topic differently. I designed a tag game, which helps participators to find the common ground between them and the other side of view. The touch screen function as a mediator to give my audiences a sense of participation. Together, they created an interactive exhibition to allow audiences to see, to experience and to think about my subject.
Lanni Zhou | lannizhou@gmail.com
The tag game user interface wireframe.
This is my first edition of tag game user interface. I didn’t the final outcome. It’s lack of information visualization nor the feedback. Thus, I redesigned the tag game final interface.
Lanni Zhou | lannizhou@gmail.com
This is the tag game result page’s final interface. I added “send me the result” options. I also connected different social groups with some endangered species. By connecting spirit animals is a new approach to visualize the final result, also raise the awareness of animal protection.
This project was derived from a Journalism class called Media, Science and Public Engagement. In that class we talked about Journalism protects democracy by informing the public. I used this project to show that design also can protect democracy by critically asking, discussing and solving social problems with the public.