SPACE10 — Climate Stressors

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Combining visualization of climate emergence with the beauty of nature

With design and research lab SPACE10, an offshoot of IKEA, we developed a set of scenes about the global climate stressors. Concentrating on the realistic visualization of the processes and their development over time, we created three sets of animations and still images that showed wildfires, floods, and droughts.

Background

SPACE10 is a research and design lab, on a mission to create a better everyday life for people and the planet. Exploring societal, technological, and environmental shifts likely to influence people’s lives in the coming years, they wanted to visualize the different ways that climate crisis is manifesting itself, through climate stressors.

Our role

To support their different projects and articles relating to the crisis, these visuals will then be used to highlight in a beautiful way, the nature we all love and remember. Our task was to create visualizations of three phenomena: wildfires, floods, and droughts. The focus was on how these processes unfold over time and, eventually, become massive forces that alter entire ecosystems.

Visually, we looked for the balance between aesthetically pleasing and alarming — we had to show the phenomena as something important that is happening here and now, although, not to create frightening catastrophic images that would leave the viewer hopeless. To achieve this, we stuck to realistic depictions of the climate stressors with an accent on the scenery in which the event occurs.

Visual research

During the course of the project, we tried different directions in visualizing the change in natural environments. After initial research, we decided to go for a brighter and lighter treatment, especially for Wildfires, where we concentrated on the forest instead of high-contrast burning coals.