The challenges facing science due to the effects of the man-made climate crisis are too complex to be tackled by any one discipline, or indeed through academic research alone. The Tangible Climate Futures project creates a research framework for the development, testing, and iteration of prototypical interfaces to communicate scientific findings and district-specific data. This offers a functional and appealing API (application programming interface) for further investigations.
Researchers from the Mobile Cloud Computing Group at TU Berlin and the intra-university Design and Computation master’s program developed a web platform and API, which were tested with students from both programs in workshops involving prototype project outlines over several weeks. Partners from the Climate Class at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Environmental and Nature Conservation Office of the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district were regularly consulted on issues relating to the climate crisis on a local level.
The Tangible Climate Futures platform enables researchers and artists to pool various forms of data (e.g. images, video, text, audio) and combine and visualize them using data fusion. Special interfaces were created to integrate data from the partners into the platform, e.g. CER datasets from the Chair of Climatology at the Institute of Ecology (Professor Dr. Dieter Scherer) and bicycle mobility data from the SimRa project led by Professor Dr. David Bermbach. The open source interfaces developed are designed to be open for continued expansion with new data sets and formats.
A series of events were organized as part of the research project. They include the exhibition of project work at the ARS Electronica in summer 2023, the Long Night of the Sciences 2023, and the UdK Rundgang 2023. Further events were held as part of the LOOPS event series, where guests from science, art and other disciplines are given the opportunity to enter into dialog; participants included Birgit Schneider, Klasse Klima, Jens Turowski, Su Yu Hsin, and Mustafah Abdulaziz. A discussion was held with climate startups at the Long Night of the Sciences. In addition to the “Tangible Climate Future” web platform, which is already online, the process, the development of the platform, and the workshop will be documented in an upcoming print publication.
