I often write about subjects that are hard to read about—climate change, extinction—so I think a lot about how to draw people toward information that mostly makes them want to run away. Musician, artist, and programmer Brian Foo has pondered the same problem, and his solution is simple. Present your readers with terrifying data, then ask them to color it in.
The graphs, maps, and other illustrations in Foo’s new Climate Change Coloring Book are based on data from studies of carbon emissions, shrinking sea ice, and other causes and consequences of climate change. They have a minimalist beauty, but it’s the act of coloring that makes them compelling: the reader becomes a participant, and by doing so, starts to grasp both the scope of the data and the enormity of its implications. I spoke to Foo about his project earlier this week.
So why a coloring book about climate change?
Well, a lot of the work I’ve done with data in the past has involved music—thinking about how music can be a vehicle for communicating patterns in data, and even evoking an emotional response to them. As an artist, it’s interesting for me to think about how can I walk someone though a dataset in a particular way.
Most days, my kids pretend that they are other animals. Sometimes they are fantastic beasts—we have a lot of dragons and griffins. Sometimes, they’re creatures that we’re more familiar with, like dogs and seals. But most of the time, they are fennec foxes.
