This project will for the first time use an interactive educational video game to enable exploration and querying of local climate change. This approach combines climate change science, energy modeling, community planning and creative problem solving to allow users to explore potential impacts, adaptation solutions, and mitigation strategies to reduce carbon emissions. Building on the team’s recent action research using the established power of science-based visualizations methods the aim is to increase awareness, inquiry and participation in climate change action. Taking advantage of the Future Delta prototype (see link below), developed as a proof of concept for a small area of Delta BC, this work extends to the broader community to create a virtual environment that will act as a tool for public use and engagement on local climate change solutions. Combining climate change modeling, 3D visualizations of real places and user interactivity we aim to make climate change science and solutions more salient and engaging to those people that conventional climate science often fails to reach.

This immersive and interactive tool will provide an active learning environment of play and exploration that can be integrated into high school curricula, as well as accessed by anyone in the broader community. Users will be invited to help design the game collaboratively with the researchers. The intention is to empower users to visualize and intuitively grasp critical scientific data while enjoying challenge, action and engagement in individual and group choices and strategies. The research aims to reach audiences across a range of age-groups, cultures, and attitudes to climate change, and discover how they react to the climate change impacts and choices in a simulated exploratory environment. We hope to raise the profile of the immediate and real issues of climate change in the Delta community as well as a suite of feasible response options. Grounded in a real place, informed by scientific information, and rigorously evaluated for effectiveness, this research will bridge the communicative power of interactive multimedia with climate change action experimentation.

This collaborative project, employs a team of people from UBC’s Creative Studies, School of Music and The Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning with the goal of working with general audiences and across disciplines to catalyze effective communication design. To play the game prototype visit http://www.futuredelta.ok.ubc.ca/

For more information on this project contact Dr. Stephen Sheppard.

Funded by: SSHRC – Insight Grant (April 2012 – March 2017)
Principal Investigator:  Dr. Stephen Sheppard
Co-Investigator:  Dr. Aleks Dulic, Creative Studies, UBC Okanagan http://web.ubc.ca/okanagan/creative/faculty.html
UBC Researchers (CALP Affiliates):  Dr. Olaf Schroth, David Flanders
UBC Students: Alicia Lavalle, Nick Sinkewicz, Malavika Mantripragada
SFU Student:  Amber Choo