V ISUA L IZ ING A BET T ER F U T U R E
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Infodesigner Arlene Birt ’02 inspires action by humanizing data
This spring the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a sobering report, compiling the available knowledge about human-caused, greenhouse gas emissions with predictions about our warming planet. Though it’s written for highlevel scientists and global policymakers, there’s a page that’s instantly comprehensible to any reader. With a chart designed by MCAD Professor Arlene Birt, it depicts the steady rise of global temperature since 1900, with an overlay of human timelines illustrating how those impacts are already being felt by people born in 1950, 1980, and 2020. “That chart gets at some of my objectives as a designer, which is to communicate clearly while putting the data into context,” Birt says. ‘“When I look at how my daughter’s lifespan looks completely different than my mom’s and my grandparents’, that’s the kind of emotional pull that could help us shift our behavior.”
Making hard data connect to our human experience has become a specialty for Birt, who is building a global reputation for translating complex information about environmental sustainability into memorable visual stories. A founding faculty member of MCAD’s Master of Arts in Sustainable Design and founder of Background Stories, an infodesign consulting firm, Birt recently talked with CUT/PASTE about why creatives need to be involved in solving humankind’s greatest crisis. It’s not often that graphic designers get called out for their great work, but both the Washington Post and Financial Times have published stories about the impact of the infographics you created for the UN IPCC’s report. What’s that been like? For the past year and a half, I’ve been working with more than 60 climate scientists from around the world to develop and collaboratively design these figures for the U.N. Synthesis Report, which had to be approved, line by line, by 195 governments. There were so many different rounds of approval that at some point there were more than 30,000 government comments with about 6,000 of them focused on the figures. It’s been exciting to see my name out there, but it’s also been an intensive process. It’s going to take some time to recover. What’s it like being an artist in a world of scientists? When I first started working with the team, I would be