Climate Media Factory is a media, consulting and concept agency based in Potsdam and a partner in the I-CHANGE project. For ten years we have been supporting our clients in shaping social discourses about the future. In doing so, we bring narrative, creative and scientific expertise to the table. Our work is transdisciplinary and to date our focus is on communicating sustainable development issues.
When we communicate climate change and its impacts in our work, we always face two major challenges. On the one hand, we don’t want to scare the audience with horror scenarios. On the other hand, we also do not want to “bore” them with positive visions of the future, because static descriptions of a state, whether positive or negative, are not captivating.
However, climate change communication must engage and activate each and every one of us to drive change towards a more sustainable future. Especially because citizens and the civil society play a central role in defining how environmental protection and climate action should look like, and their direct participation is crucial to drive real behavioural change towards more sustainable patterns.
To achieve these individual and societal behavioural changes, communicative appeals to fear which are often used are mostly nonsensical. They can be effective in situations where a solution can be brought about very quickly, but for the problems for which we are seeking solutions with our project, it is not possible to find an easy way out. Presentations that focus exclusively on horror scenarios make people feel bad and lead to aggression towards the sender rather than outrage about the circumstance. And that is definitely not helpful.
The I-CHANGE project therefore takes a different approach and encourages citizens to actively participate in the discourse by setting up eight Living Labs in different countries within and outside Europe where they can learn and discuss about climate change, actively participate in experiments and workshops and thereby collect data that is then used to develop solutions to climate change. The I-Change team believes in empowerment through knowledge gained through hands-on participation and wants people to understand the role and impact of their individual choices (behaviour, lifestyle and consumption) and the consequences for the environment through their participation in the Living Labs.
In order to motivate as many citizens as possible to participate in the Living Labs, good communication is necessary. The I-CHANGE team will therefore develop communicative approaches and media presentations that are directly related to the transformation processes to be achieved in the Living Labs. The Climate Media Factory will be responsible for the video documentation and will develop visually appealing and informative videos, icons and info graphics to support the work in the Living Labs as well as statements by experts from the project consortium which will be informative and arouse interest. These media outputs will illustrate the diversity of the Living Labs and show how all-encompassing the issue of climate change is and that we all need to work together to change our behaviour, understand the most effective leavers and to achieve transformation and thereby decrease climate change and global warming.
In a nutshell: we will either focus on terrible scenarios nor on simple pictures of a bright future; we will focus on the pathway which we should take together to tackle future challenges.
Stay tuned for more on this website soon!