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House of Cards: Climate change and a moving metaphor

I am not a stylist. I rarely use metaphors or other devices. I do not study figuration.  But I try to attend, nevertheless, to the style I see. So I was struck, as I compared Ocean and Atmosphere, that they both used the metaphor "house of cards," and they use them in very different ways and to very different purposes. I'm calling it a moving metaphor, because I think the two uses of "house of cards" -- for whatever it does for our understanding of climate change or climate science -- remind us of the fecundity, the flexibility, the fluidity of rhetorical devices, devices that can succinctly capture connections or quickly clarify concepts.  

Atmosphere does it big, with a painting as exhibit backdrop. Standing at the front of the gallery looking down the center, the house of cards painting on a black wall stands out, aesthetically distinct from the rest of the gallery. To my eye, it felt out of place, like it didn't belong, a remnant of an exhibit past. But I'm thorough, and when I looked closer, at the surprisingly antiquated video display, I learned that the floor to ceiling painting of a house of cards by David Shrigley was commissioned for the gallery. It's the first in a series of commissioned works that will accompany the exhibit.  

Shrigley describes his painting this way: "My artwork is a scaled-up drawing of a house of cards. The metaphor I have used is quite a quite straightforward one: our atmosphere and environment are in very delicate balance; a balance that would be disastrous for us to upset."

The obviousness of his description and the piece of art is disappointing. I rather appreciated it more when I thought it was doing some vague, other work that wasn't associated with the exhibit -- "What's this all about?" led me in other directions. But it's a house of cards. It represents the delicate balance of climate change. And, to be honest, I'm bored. 

Yet the banality of Shrigley's use of this metaphor speaks to the power of the metaphor generally. My problem -- and my initial confusion -- is thus an effect of a metaphor's possible uses. In being so "straightforward" the work has no real connection to the specific content of climate change. The implication exists, but it's weak, undermined by an aesthetic not consistent with the rest of the exhibit space. Move this art installation anywhere, and its meaning shifts, becoming tied to the space and context in which it's located. This should be expected, I suppose, in a commissioned piece. What is more, while this movability indicates the beauty and power of the core metaphor, it simultaneously indicates the weakness of this instance of it. Standing alone, it does no real critical work, because alone it's the archetype of "the house of cards metaphor" -- not a real application that creates a specific meaning.  

It's weak for another reason as well: does human induced global warming impact the climate as if it were a house of cards? Will the climate tumble down, crash, fail structurally? When the house of cards tumbles, it's no longer a house; it's a (rather flat) pile of cards. In what ways does the climate tumble? For us? Forever? In short, all the "house of cards" metaphor does is highlight a sense of balance; and like its own metaphor, it sort of falls apart thereafter. One might have asked, "Why not paint a large image that represented the idea of 'tipping point' instead?"

This instance of the metaphor is easily contrasted by its use in Ocean, the gallery in Paris. While not at all prominent and mostly likely missed by the majority of visitors, this use of the "house of cards" metaphor does more interesting work.  It shows up in my favorite section, the Uncertainty in Climate Science unit, where Sondrine Bony, a climatologist, speaks to why gaps in the scientific picture do not upend our entire understanding of the climate change.  She says:

"The presence of numerous uncertainties is in no way incompatible with also having certainties and well established facts. Indeed, the state of scientific knowledge is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a house of cards: hesitating over the position of a given piece does not diminish the fact that the other pieces are definitely in the right place given that their positions math with the various adjacent pieces or with the overall image."

Here the "house of cards" metaphor isn't simply representational (the balance of forces in Shrigley's work). This use not only creates a clear image of the epistemological structure of science, but it effects a mental shift in our understanding of the way science works, which, subsequently, alters our critical relationship to it.  Granted, much of this occurs because one metaphor is contrasted with another. Nevertheless, the use to which "house of cards" is put does more to indicate the power of metaphor than the "straightforward" one used by Shrigley.  His is the archetype, the metaphor that can move but means little; Bony's is the instance that, because situated, illuminates. 

Road Trip

We're heading south! To the Creation Museum near Cincinnati! 

I'm excited to see what's really going on here and to determine whether this museum might serve as a good starting point for a book project. After all, it -- along with the Scientology psychology museum in CA -- really brings home the power of museums to persuade and communicate messages: if the work science and natural histories do didn't matter, then they wouldn't need to countered by these other institutions.

Stay tuned!

Just a Title?

I started this comparison of climate change exhibits with the assumption that the way the three were framed (based loosely on the way they were titled) would matter thematically.  While the HMNH wasn't titled as simply as the other two exhibits, I read into it a planetary -- almost an astronomical -- framework, an organization that takes us across time and through space.  Atmosphere and Oceans, the two european exhibits, have more parallel titles which I expected would yield a more parallel comparison. Essentially the question I imagined I'd be asking was "In what ways does the titles organize, frame, or influence the shape of the exhibits?"  In my case, this question boiled down to "What are the differences that matter between a planetary, an atmospheric, and an oceanic exhibit on climate change?"  But there's a factor here that I overlooked, and it speaks to the sophistication of museum rhetoric and it reinforces the research methodology I need to be employing more often.  That factor is that sometimes a title is just a title.

The substantive point first. When I find an exhibit that seems useful, I've been contacting museums for interviews with designers, curators, and program developers. Sometimes this pans out, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends on the character of the institution. The Wellcome Collection, for instance, is very different from the Science Museum in London. The Wellcome does no evaluation, doesn't really believe in it, but the Science Museum is based on it, and much of its funding requires numerous evaluation reports. So when I visited atmosphere, I was able to speak to the lead designer and she shared many of the early planning documents and research. One of those documents is a research report titled "Naming the Climate Change Gallery," and it's a fascinating window into the titling process. 

The purpose of the research was to determine the answer to what are essentially audience analysis questions:

• What are the expectations of the gallery in terms of topic, content and experience?
• How appealing is the name and does it motivate to visit?
• Who is the perceived target audience?
• What emotional reaction do the titles engender?

To get at these questions, the document reports on a study of six small group discussions, each with four to five potential visitors from a variety of age groups.  Discussion centered on eight candidate titles evaluated on the above four questions:

• Our Planet, Our Challenge
• Climate Change
• A Climate of Change
• Changing Our World
• Our Changing Climate
• Atmosphere
• Climate Science
• Our Changing World

After the discussion and analysis, the titles were then plotted on a quadrant with more appealing/less appealing as the x-axis and more informative/less informative as the y-axis.   From these groups, the research team concluded that exhibit titles with the words "climate change" in them received a "fatigued response."  They recommended choosing a title "with some degree of intrigue." The final recommendation was to pick one of three: Atmosphere; Our Planet, Our Challenge; or Our Changing World.  

What this report tells us is that the title "atmosphere" plays a primarily rhetorical function. It does not frame, organize, or indicate key themes. This goes against initial expectations, but the exhibit's content reinforces the point: beyond the commonplace description of greenhouse gasses, there is little in the exhibit focused on the atmosphere itself. Instead, "atmosphere" is a rhetorical ploy to capture visitor interest without inducing climate change fatigue.  As the report concludes, it's a vague, "cool" title that intrigues, bringing visitors into what is ultimately a very engaging climate change exhibit. But beyond this function, it doesn't do much heavy lifting for the exhibit. It's just a very smart title.

When I turn to the Oceans gallery next, it will be clear that this title frames and organizes. It accomplishes the same rhetorical effect but still meets expectations by being thematically relevant.  It joins the framing of the HMNH with the rhetorical power of the Science Museum. It's not just a title.

Now to the methodological point. Could I have made this argument without the planning document? Definitely. But I wouldn't have been as confident with it.  The exhibit's content does not develop atmosphere, and the question of relevance comes up easily.  But having the planning documents triangulates the point. It's a reminder that, where possible, it's important to secure these resources. It's also a reminder to have more confidence in some of my claims even in the absence of them.

Aiming

Possible publisher?  At the very least, a resource for relevant works and a community I can't ignore.

Moved by Moving: the rhetoric of interactive exhibits in atmosphere

I think the most exciting thing to note about the atmosphere exhibit, though, is the way that the exhibit engages visitors. I've always struggled with how to make sense of an exhibit's interactive components.  The push me/pull me/press me exhibit elements are usually frustrating failures at really communicating basic scientific principles or capturing the essence of scientific inquiry. And more often than not, I fail to get the point, even after spending lots of time working with the buttons and variables. Not that I'm the benchmark, but if I can't understand what's going on, how can I expect a kid to? or someone who spends even less time on it? But the interactives in atmosphere finally made a bit of sense to me and I was able to locate part of their rhetorical function. 

The key -- and this will come up again when I get to the Oceans exhibit from Paris -- is that the most powerful interactives here place visitors in a specific role.  Visitors are city planners allocating resources to save houses from the flooding Thames (climate changed induced flooding, of course); they're reporters gathering information for stories on current technologies that can help prevent further climate change; they're interns building climate models; they're scientists running those models for people across the world to see how different environmental changes affect regional livelihoods; and they're engineers joining the energy firm for the mock-city Gridland.  Much of the exhibit is focused in these games and simulations rather than in text-heavy panels. That text exists, but it's funneled into digital components and on-line resources, each deep and rich with visuals, video, and more text than any one exhibit should reasonably include.

The comparison with the Harvard exhibit is instructive for how we understand the rhetorical effect of these simulations and games. The HMNH exhibit was didactic and organized chronologically, establishing fact before letting the visitor loose on a voting installation about policy decisions. In atmosphere, those policy decions are spread throughout the exhibit and used not as a culminating experience but as part of the persuasive appeal.  I can simplify it this way. In the HMNH exhibit, we see a very standard rhetorical approach: become comvinced of the facts of a case and then use those facts to affect policy. It's epideictic in its core because the celebration of science in the exhibit proper feeds into the pseudo-democratic experience and then, ideally, into a real one outside the exhibit.  In atmosphere all that is flipped around. 

Each of the games and simulations model deliberative behavior by an expert -- a city planner, journalist, scientist, proto-scientist, etc.  And internal to each of these installations is a series of facts and assumptions about how climate change, greenhouse gasses, and the environment work.  Instead of being convinced of the facts and then moved to act, atmosphere merges the two experiences. In doing so, the rhetorical act is short circuited. Visitors are already making decisions based on the facts of climate change, even if they don't understand them fully or fully believe in them.  In short, visitors are persuaded not before but through the interactive experience.  

What's more, by taking up the role of these diverse experts, visitors begin to think with a real level of responsibility.  The effects and choices are made real -- the need to compete to save money and houses, get their four stories on the front page, improve the climate model, inform the international citizen, etc.  So, besides coming to occupy the mindset of the scientist expert and the requisite assumptions they use to make choices, there is also a required empathy in many (though not all) of these tasks.  There is a bigger picture -- houses lost, scientists left un-helped, people with real problems not informed, etc.  However false and simulated, visitors become invested in their choices and in their outcomes. There's a reality to the simulations that the reality of the didactic exhibit fails to capture. The interactives have a broader resonance, even if they don't fully capture or convey the state of scientific knowledge. 

Visitors occupy the position of people who understand, believe, and act on the facts of climate science. They might not be persuaded in a traditional fasion, but they're moved by moving. 

The Initial Authority of Atmosphere

On a related note, the opening panel also establishes and diffuses the exhibit's basic appeal to authority.  Like the Making the Modern World exhibit discussed below, atmosphere also uses a degree of self-consciosusness for interesting effects.  This comes across in two sections of the opening panel that follows the introductory section I just discussed.

"This gallery has been created with the support of a huge range of individuals, from scientific institutions to businesses and governments. Working together, we can push ideas futher and find solutions faster -- something we all need to be good at in a climate-changing world." 

A third section discuses the exhibit in terms of its own environmental impacts:

"How do you create a gallery that will inspire hundreds of thousands of visitors -- and tread lightly with your carbon footprint at the same time? We knew it wouldn't be easy...  With the help of experts we've traced the carbon emissions that lie behind many different items. We've considered the energy they will use, how they're made adn transported to the Museum, as well as how long they'll last and how they'll be disposed of. Armed with these details we set out to make informed choices. And at the same time, the team looked at more efficient things to do in our own offices."

Each of these extensions of the exhibit's initial message do interesting things to both exhibit and museum ethos.  The first one effectively diffuses the exhibit's authority, bringing in a variety of broader stakeholders in order so that the force of the exhibit's authority doesn't rest only on the museum itself.  The diffusion has the effect of enhancing the exhibit's ethos, especially among those audiences that are concerned that environmental policy will have negative effects on businesses.  This is reinforced by the exhibit's "principle sponsors" -- Shell and Siemens -- both of whom get short blurbs about their commitment to the environment and understanding climate change:

Shell: All of us need energy to develop and grow. But to protect our planet we must produce less CO2. That's why at Shell, we are working hard to build a new energy system whil supporting a deeper understanding of climate science.

Siemens: Siemens is proud to sponsor atmosphere -- inspiring future scientists and engineers to answer the world's toughest questions in search of a sustainable future.

Both of these statments, however, can be read in a much more cynical way. The first one trades on "deeper understanding", a common trope for climate skeptics; and the second appeals not to understanding but to the creation of smarter workforce, a move that focuses on a result secondary to the exhibit's primary goals.  

The second addition to the introductory text also establishes that the exhibit walks-the-walks of environmental thinking, thus preempting any visitor that would point to the museum's huge carbon footprint as way of indicating the exhibit's hypocrisy. It's a savvy move, and it reinforces the power of exhibit self-consciousness and the way that this raises the bar for critical visitors and critics alike.

Planet vs. Oceans vs. Atmosphere Part II: Atmosphere and Scientific Authority

While I didn't pick the most significant climate change exhibit in the US, when I turn to compare it with exhibits across the Atlantic, I see some pretty dramatic differences. I'm returning to atmosphere here, the large exhibit at the Science Museum in London. I spent a good part of two days in this exhibit and talked with the lead designer who was kind enough to share a number of really fascinating planning documents. My initial pass highlighted the exhibit space -- the atmosphere of atmosphere.  A closer look at my photos reveal a few other aspects of the exhibit worth noting.

One of my basic assumptions -- or I guess hypotheses -- going into this project is that topics like global warming and evolution would be treated discernibly differently between the states and Europe.  Part of this hypothesis is that the exhibits in Europe won't be as defensive, because they wouldn't have to defend themselves against the skeptics and doubters and religious fundamentalists. Those populations and movements just don't have as much traction there as here.  But atmosphere surprised me.  The opening panel (always critical, right?) starts this way:

"Working out what's happening to our climate really matters for our choices today and into the future. Science doesn't have 'final answers', but it's a powerful way to make sense of this incredible and complex planet. atmosphere aims to help you make sense of that science -- to see for yourself what's happening, why, and what could be around the corner..." 

Remnants of my graduate student self loves the "final answers" bit, but it's the subtle transition (or the quick move) from that admission to the real purpose of the exhibit that indicates the exhibit remains in a defensive stance.  Heck, even the "final answers" phrase indicates this, right? That phrase acknowledges fundamental uncertainties and contingencies in scientific knowledge, but the exhibit brushes past it to give the visitor the current state what scientists know. 

The distinction is a hard one for me to explain. So let me try again. If we assumed that climate change was settled science (as I hypothesized the exhibit would be more free to do than its US counterparts), then framing the exhibit around what scientists know now wouldn't be necessary. Instead, the exhibit would jump right into explaining the processes, not explaining how science knows these processes. I must be cautious here, though, because I'm the guy that seeks exhibits that "explain how science knows its processes."  Let me show you what I mean, and you can judge whether I'm wrong or not.  

The exhibit is organized around a series of hubs. Each hub responds to a theme. The themes are as follows (not in any particular order, since this is an open exhibit): Climate System, Earth's Energy Balance, Carbon Cycle, What Might Happen, Future Choices.  Many of these include what I'll call key questions that provide a link to the explanations that occur through the hub's objects and interactives.  These questions go like this:

• Can science and technology help tackle climate change (geo-engineering)
• How do scientists know the Earth's climate is changing? (measurement tools)
• How do scientists know what the Earth's climate was like in the past? (measurement tools)
• When did scientists discover the greenhouse effect and its influence on the climate? (historical personages)

To my ear, each of these captures, in essence, much of what is going on in the Harvard exhibit: establishing the state of scientific knowledge in order to enhance public understanding. But by talking about science itself, this feels more defensive to me.  In other words, this becomes an exhibit about the state of scientific knowledge and not scientific knowledge.  With me?

I'm very torn here, though, because what I'm finding a problem with is something I always want to see: the display scientific processes and the state of science itself.  But if I'm not just throwing up my own defensive stance onto the exhibit, then for me the feeling of defensiveness undermines that approach. Instead of honestly exploring the history and nature of scientific knowledge, these questions and this approach essentially reinforce a more basic scientific authority, the kind that is easily dismissible and fails to illuminate the nature of science for the public. 

Biking to Save Your Life

Created by: Healthcare Management Degree

Becoming a Diagnostician

I can't help but read this quote by Daniel Kahneman through the lens of a writing instructor. It points to both the gaps in my own training and a large part of what I try to convey to my students:

To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), p. 3

Planet vs. Atmosphere vs. Oceans: Three Frames for Exhibiting Global Climate Change (Part I)

My task these past few weeks has been to write up more bloggable moments, brief insights that seem worthy of developing as articles or chapters. I've also been writing some conference proposals that I hope will successfully be serious deadlines for 2012.  The abstract task sometimes seems at cross purposes with the bloggable moments. Brief insights don't constitute a very compelling conference proposal.  So I'm working slowly to attack one of my larger ideas: That the ways three different museums chose to frame global warming affords very different types of exhibits.  

The three exhibits I'm working with are Atmosphere at London’s Science Museum (SM), Oceans at Paris’s Cité des Sciences (CS), and Climate Change: Our Global Experiment at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH).  It's a superficial starting point, after all, anyone would notice that the titles of these exhibits are different. My question is whether those titles -- and the way they frame and direct the entire exhibit -- matter in a meaningful way. 

I'm starting with the HMNH exhibit because I've not reviewed it recently, and so it's the largest unknown. When I visited it in 2010, I was impressed. It was organized, well-developed, powerfully argued, and, most importantly, culminated in a nice voting installation that activated visitors as engaged citizens deciding policy. 

Clear from the title, this exhibit is framed planetarily.  What does this framework afford the exhibit? This is a tough question to address, because the temptation is to assert that any framework causes or forces a particular representation, argument, or experience. I don't believe this is true. There are a number of factors influencing the shape of this exhibit, perhaps most important here is the academic background of the authors (Harvard University Center for the Environment) and the institution (HMNH).  

The exhibit's planetary focus -- it is, after all subtitled "our global experiment" -- is developed in three chronological sections: Climate Past, Climate Present, and Climate Future. Though it begins with a panel common to most climate change exhibits explaining how the greenhouse effect works, the planetary framework is evident employed rather quickly.  The Climate Past section puts the climate of the Earth into planetary and historical perspective. Earth -- a sort of Golidlocks planet, not too hot, not too cold -- is efficiently compared with Mars (cold) and Venus (hot) in order to show us the climate possibilities for a planet like ours. We are then thrown into the past -- the Pleistocene and the Eocene, epochs of extreme cold and warmth respectively -- to see how the larger climate trends on Earth have worked.  Climate Present section is structured in two parts, the first demonstrating that the Earth is heating up and the second demonstrating that human-produced CO2 gases are the primary cause. 

So what?  

While I know I can't say that the decision to use the planet as the focus has any necessary effects, it does afford certain kind of arguments. This will become clearer, I think, when I compare it with the other two exhibits. But for now, let me try to summarize what I see as the relevance of the planetary frame with some brief comparative points where necessary.

Essentially, the argument I want to make is that the generic planetary focus in this exhibit creates the broadest intellectual space for demonstrating the existence of anthropomorphic global climate.  If an exhibit wishes to make the strongest, most compelling argument for global climate change, then this foundation affords this, because an exhibit can fold in everything it needs.  And here the HMNH doesn't disappoint.  In short, the exhibit marshals the planetary perspective, first and foremost, to argue for a specific conclusion, a conclusion that is expected to motivate you in the final installation. If a visitor felt ignorant and sought understanding, this exhibit provides a nicely comprehensive case.   Similarly, if a climate change skeptic encountered this exhibit, they'd be forced to navigate a very powerful argument, one that would be difficult to easily dismiss.

One effect of this sort of design is that it generates an exhibit that is rather remote for visitors.  The comparison of planets and the comparison across distant epochs are both important intellectual arguments, they are so distant from our experience that they don't capture our emotions. I will argue that the other two frames -- Oceans and Atmosphere -- do not necessarily fall prey to this problem.  

In the end, Climate Change: Our Global Experiment turns out to be a rather traditional, textbook-on-the-walls kind of exhibit. While it ends with visitors deciding on future policies, the voting is only allowed once the entire argument has been imbibed. Only once they understand our climate past and our climate present can visitors have a voice in our climate future. This is the deficit model, the transmission model, where the exhibit's real purpose is to remedy the lack of visitor understanding.  Again, there is nothing about a planetary framework that necessitates this kind of exhibit. But this framework does facilitate it, affording an academic design team in an academic setting the basis on which to build a very didactic exhibit.