Our world climate is an incredibly complex and ever-changing system. The reality of climate change and the consequential pressure to act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires immediate attention. And yet, despite this unprecedented urgency, active public engagement needed to motivate meaningful change is still missing.

This graduation project explores how to utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) – to motivate public engagement through the emotion of fascination and element of play. The final design of this exploration is an interactive exhibition piece that allows its users to create novel, AI-generated landscapes.

In the first phase of the project, hands-on exploration of the use of GANs as a design opportunity was conducted and the experiences of the exploration process documented. Further research through interviews with climate researchers and literature review into the topics of climate change helped to get an understanding of the climate context and map out and narrow down the solution space for the following ideation phase. The context research revealed that the current climate debate is deeply emotional, with mostly negative emotions like fear and hopelessness in its center. Yet, it was also found that fostering positive emotions like fascination and joy is a potential means to increase interest and motivate people to engage with climate initiatives. Based on the context exploration, a series of design prototypes were created and tested with participants to inform the final design.

The final concept LANDSHAPES is an interactive exhibition piece intended for the museum context. It features a circular projection of AI-generated aerial landscapes – images that look real, yet have never been seen by anyone before. The installation enables participants to become absorbed in the morphing landscapes and experience their potential impact on our surroundings in a playful, open-ended manner.
A preliminary installation was evaluated with participants using qualitative methods of observation and interviews. The installation evoked a deep sense of beauty, calmness, and inspiration that contributed to a meditation-like, engaging experience. Even without a predefined narrative, participants automatically associated the morphing images with our changing planet and ascribed meaning to the abstract visuals. The addition of control over the moving landscapes resulted in a mindset shift, as the experience transformed from a passive and meditative experience to an experience with additional cognitive involvement. The preference of experience differed between participants.

The design research conducted in this project strengthens the assumption that experiences with positive emotion in its center can be used to foster initial engagement with the topic of climate change. Furthermore, it showed that GAN technology can be used to evoke an emotional response, which offers interesting opportunities for future work. More specifically, the research suggests the potential for further development of playful experiences to make climate data accessible and engaging to the general public, as well as an opportunity to explore GANs that utilize emotional value as an input to generate targeted media that reinforces or counteracts the viewer’s emotional response.