CARBON CORNER | Demystifying Carbon: Using Visualization to Build Momentum

BURST OUT OF OUR ‘INDUSTRY BUBBLE’ BY USING HIGH-END VISUALIZATIONS AND STORYTELLING TO EXPLAIN CARBON TO WIDE AUDIENCES AND CREATE POSITIVE CHANGE!

You go to the same green building conferences every year, hoping to be challenged by the conviction and creativity of the people and their amazing work. Amidst an intense happy-hour conversation with new inspiring friends, you find yourself thinking that we’ve got a shot at making something beautiful and long-lasting, if there are people like this in the world.

On your flight home, you look out the window at the vast city. The sheer scale of humanity on the planet sobers you. You think back to the best sessions you sat through. You understood the message immediately, but you have been breathing sustainability since you were a teen. You speak the language. You’re an insider. You realize that many of your clients, users, stakeholders, and even family members don’t just get it. If they sat through that same presentation, they’d likely be confused or bored because the information isn’t being presented in a way that is accessible to them.

The green building industry demographic is an amazing seed group, but we cannot afford to function like an ivory tower, shrouded in a fog of industry jargon. We need to communicate our ideas to diverse audiences that engages and excites them, ignites their wills, so that we can build the cultural intelligence required to face humanity’s ongoing challenges.

Hence, our quest to unpack the complex world of carbon emissions at multiple project scales, typologies, and timeframes. We have started to team up with industry leaders, storytellers and digital artists, and devoted ourselves to breaking the message through the industry bubble. We identified ways in which visual storytelling techniques are sorely needed to create positive impact, clearing up long-standing areas of vagueness and confusion, and injecting some much-needed precision in how we talk about carbon.

We are working to breakdown the boundaries of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) measurement for corporations vs. buildings vs. communities/campuses vs. cities – highlighting pathways to carbon neutrality. We will discuss the carbon policy developments across the most progressive global jurisdictions, how policy makers can be better engaged, research demonstrating the crucial importance of existing buildings, and why visualization could be the missing puzzle piece to moving positive change forward.

And we are deeply interested in how real-time LCA modeling with BIM-integrated visualization effects can help our industry advance the LCA market, and provide consultants with faster modeling results that are easier to understand. And layering in the power of visualization techniques to explain complicated topics well, so that wide audiences can understand them. We are digging deep into complex issues related to carbon in the built environment, and weaving visualizations with discussions to make the issues clear and precise in the minds of the audience.

Stay tuned for a full animation video, as well as individual vignettes, that will be released through 2018! We looking to get everyone on the same page – from advanced practitioners, to those with a basic understanding of carbon, and even folks who are new to the industry through our Carbon Corner blog series. From misconceptions to ah-ha moments, this video series will develop and align our skills on the topic of “carbon in the built environment”.