We have lived on the earth for tens of thousands of years, adding a lot of things that were not there before. We build houses, various factories, and human footprints are all over the earth. With the growing number of people and the development of cities, the impact of human beings on the environment is increasing, which has caused many problems.
Such as industrial pollution, city heat island, and the expansion of the city destroyed many biological habitats. These changed the original environment, many glaciers melted, the number of rainforests decreased, greenhouse gases increased, and so on. And the most serious problem is climate change, which caused global warming.
If this situation continues, maybe in 50 years, our planet will not have a livable environment. These effects will influence all living things, including humans, especially the future generation.
How to make the future generation have a healthy living environment? How can we protect the environment and make it sustainable?
From now on, we need to understand the real situation and the causes and consequences of climate change. Then we know how to mitigate it. By understanding climate change, we can transform our living habits to alleviate the climate from getting worse. One person’s behavior change may not have an effect, but hundreds or thousands of people’s changes may have a big impact.
We can start from the simple, like the most basic garbage sorting and recycling. Use public transportation, green transportation to reduce exhaust emissions. In order to realize these ideas, future generation needs to learn more about climate change.
In my research, I found that more and more people now support the teaching of climate change knowledge in schools. Although like political factors, social factors still have an impact, more than 60% of people believe that schools should teach climate change. And I also learned that in my interview, modern students actually have a need for knowledge of climate change. They may hear a lot about climate change outside of school, and they will be curious about it, which is why they need someone to tell them the right direction.
Actually, there are very few teachers who specialize in teaching climate change. In high school, climate change is usually embedded(um bed ed) in chemistry, physics, and biology, as a unit. Besides, some teachers think they don’t understand enough about climate change, and there is no special courses and no special textbooks. There is a research by ASU pointed out that even undergraduate textbooks have very little information on climate change.
I think that as a designer, the part I can help in is teaching materials. I have two rough ideas now. I want to target young children, like elementary school students. Because this age group is an important stage in the formation of living habits.
The first idea was to design a climate change video game to teach students about climate impact and ecological change. Games are a very attractive teaching method for children.
The second idea is to design or redesign the textbook. To make the information of the book be more interesting. It would be really cool to make a pop-up book to show students information in 3D.