Climate Stories, or how designing a mobile phone app helped me learn about climate psychology (Part II — Everyone loves stories)
This story is part of a mini-blog series showcasing my MSc dissertation in Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London, which helped me position myself as a UX professional with a passion for Tech for Good. This project was awarded a distinction mark in 2021.
- PREVIOUS IN SERIES: Part I — A soup with three ingredients
- NEXT IN SERIES: Part III — Ideating alone in the pandemic (please check back later)
“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor” — Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Righteous Mind’
To paraphrase the quote above, stories are the mechanism that our minds use to make sense of the world. The power of stories is so great that they can help us achieve seemingly any purpose — they can help us memorise, educate, validate, lift, motivate, transform. This power has been well known and well used in all sorts of settings, from primary school classrooms to business leadership.
Climate storytelling is nothing new and has been widely used in film and television. In his BBC documentary ‘Earth — The Climate Wars’ the scientist and presenter Iain Stewart educates viewers about climate change by telling stories about climate scientists and the adversities they face. And then, of course, there is ‘The Attenborough effect’ — where the storytelling passion and skill of David Attenborough has been shown to motivate his viewers to fight climate change and environmental pollution.
Climate psychology, too, has zoomed in on storytelling as a means of strengthening the climate message. In the book that has kickstarted my own journey, Per Espen Stoknes’ “What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action”, the author urges us to “use the power of stories to create meaning and community” and offers a solution of making climate messages “story-based.” Other climate psychologists and activists such as George Marshall and Edward Maibach (from the Center for Climate Change Communication) support the same idea.
As my project progressed, the theme of storytelling became ever stronger — not just within the literature I read, but in my own research, too. More on this below — but first…
Objectives (but not the OKR kind)
Before I delve further into the world of climate storytelling, I would like to step back a little and outline a few of the nooks and crannies of the academic process I’ve been following for this project.
In commercial tech, the desired outcome of any digital technology project is a real-life product that is designed, built, shipped to customers who are delighted to see their needs-wants-desires met by the product, and keep coming back for more, generating a sustained profit for the business.
This particular project is not in the commercial realm, though. It’s in the academia realm. Here, there are no real-world customers. Instead, it’s all about research objectives.
Research objectives are short statements (that could also be phrased as questions) that spell out what the researcher is setting out to do before they start their project. The rest of the project must attempt to address these objectives.
A successful HCID academic study is one that:
- Defines crisp and clear research objectives backed by solid research
- Follows a solid method to address these objectives
- Demonstrates how they have addressed the said objectives through the results of their study.
If the results are not as expected, this doesn’t mean the project has failed. Providing that the researcher can demonstrate the integrity of their approach, it is still deemed a worthwhile contribution to the field.
The academic discipline of HCID is not bound by the narrow constraints of being solely judged by the commercial success of the new technology that it creates. Instead, it can experiment, imagine the futures that could be, and learn from failures, without being tied down by commercial OKRs, KPIs or NPS scores. Because of this, I passionately believe that some of this research will help shape the future of better products, make the world a better place, and eventually feed into market success.
But enough evangelising already. Here were my research objectives (with a no-jargon translation where I was able to provide one):
- Overall objective: To investigate whether persuasive technology can play a role in breaking the socially constructed silence surrounding the subject of climate change.
- Sub-objective 1: To establish a set of principles for the design of the persuasive technology that supports its users in, and helps break the barriers to, climate change communication. (No-jargon: Figure out the project brief)
- Sub-objective 2: To build a novel persuasive technology that uses these principles. (No-jargon: Build my mobile app prototype)
- Sub-objective 3: To measure the persuasiveness of the proposed technology in terms of how well it supports its users in communicating about climate change. (No-jargon: Figure out how well my app is performing with real users)
Mixed methods: Quadruple Diamond
Armed with my objectives, I went back to my mixed methods (discussed in detail in my previous post of this blog series). Whipping these up into a workable system proved as much art as science. I went around the houses a few times — even after my research and design work was well underway — comparing and combining the various parts to test what worked and what did not. I ended up with a somewhat Frankeinsteinian concoction I call the ‘Quadruple Diamond’ (based on Design Council’s Double Diamond that had become synonymous with the UX process).
The four ‘diamonds’ in my process were:
- Exploration: critical context, research interviews, and a focus on climate stories
- Ideation and design requirements for the app
- First design cycle — aka improving usability
- Second design cycle — aka experimental testing to address my objectives
In this post, I will be covering the first one. The remaining three will be covered in follow-up posts.
Into the first diamond: Exploration and interviews
A brief note on critical context
For academic projects, a thorough study of critical context (in layperson terms, a literature review) is essential to help the researcher understand what has been done before them and avoid reinventing the wheel. All I’ll say about it here is that I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time in Google Play Store reviewing various apps, as well as reading dozens of academic articles on persuasive technology and climate psychology. If you would like a fuller walkthrough of how I’ve gone about it and what I’ve discovered, get in touch.
Research interviews
In-depth research interviews, conducted over a fortnight and yielding hours upon hours of rich qualitative interview data, were a key part of my exploration phase. Their goal was to get me to gain insight into the potential users’ approaches to climate communication and to help me kick it off with my own design process.
I recruited eight participants who were keen on talking about climate change. I ensured there was a diverse enough crowd — from those who were passionate about climate change and wanted to talk about it all the time, to those who were unsure and underconfident.
To help me facilitate the interviews — which were conducted remotely due to the pandemic — I wrote a discussion guide with a list of questions derived from climate psychology, leaning heavily on the work of Stoknes et al.
Questions fell into the following categories:
- The interviewees’ motivations, goals and barriers to speaking about climate change
- Their use of social networks for climate communication
- What worked best for interviewees in their own experiences of climate communication, and what did not work
- Background information (extent of their climate change alarm, how often they communicate about climate change, technology profile)
An interlude
Ah, remote interviews! Don’t you just suck. No physical connection, no ability to observe the participant’s behaviour outside of the confines of the computer screen, lack of context.
But because I advertised for remote interviewees, I was able to reach a vastly varied pool of people, including some that were scattered across the globe (Denmark and Estonia, among others) and who had a fascinating array of life experiences. Thus, they were able to show me an insightful take on climate communication that I might not have had otherwise.
And many of them had amazing stories to tell.
Data analysis
After the interviews, a lengthy period of data analysis followed. I carried out a thematic analysis of verbatim interview transcripts using a QDA (qualitative data analysis) tool NVivo. Then I consulted my key texts (Stoknes, Marshall, Maibach et al) to make sure that their recommendations were incorporated on top of what my research interviews showed.
Then, I looked specifically for opportunities for persuasive technology. This approach was openly biased, but the Persuasive Systems Design framework specifically permitted designer bias, as long as it was done according to its ethical postulates. (If I wanted a fully tabula rasa process, I would have opted for something like the Grounded Theory instead.)
Through this process, I was able to synthesise a set of my very own “Principles for effective climate communication.”
Principles for effective climate communication:
- Use social power
- Use positive communication framings
- Communicate with stories or narratives
- Provide signals of progress
- Support the communicator’s identity
My data also revealed that the barriers to climate communication for my interviews were identical to those identified by Stoknes.
There was clearly much crossover between Stoknes’ principles, those of other prominent climate psychologists and activists, and my own. If so, why bother with these interviews at all? Well — to ensure a solid foundation for my project, I needed to ground my approach in my own data instead of merely following others’ recommendations, however good those might be. And it paid off…
Stories, stories, stories!
My Principle no.3 — “Communicate with stories or narratives” — stood out like a sore thumb in my data analysis, and was distinctly different from the previously established climate psychology approaches.
Interviewees told me stories — either about their own climate projects or about something in the media that had gripped them. They also found that storytelling was an effective climate communication tool — it really made their listeners pay attention and even persuade them to act.
One talked passionately about their own experiences of clearing up a local river, knees deep in the water with other volunteers. Another chuckled at an article she had read in the news recently about bison being reintroduced into Kent as a part of a rewilding project (“That was weird, but it did make me laugh, but it made me think, oh, that’s good”).
Some of my participants used stories as a persuasion tool in their climate communication. One person had managed to persuade his stubborn family member to use less water by telling them a story of a dried-up river, accompanied by ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.
This was too good an opportunity for me to miss.
My project scope, as it had stood before that point, had been vast. I could spend a lifetime designing an app that would fit every single one of my research findings, and get nowhere; or, I could narrow my scope and go for something that clearly shone in my data.
So… Stories it was!
Before I conclude this post, I will briefly revisit the academic research objectives for this project.
By going through the process of interviews, thematic analysis and the review of results, I have been able to address the sub-objective 1.
So, it gets ticked off my list! Ta-da!
NEXT IN SERIES: Part III — Ideating alone in the pandemic
Please check back later for the next entry in this blog series — due in early 2022. I will update this section to include a link to it in due course.
