Hope, the Lifecycle of a Sustainability Message & Adventures in Data Collection

Welcome to adventure one from the Climate Strange Choose Your Adventure post on the Sustainability Newsletter. Let's begin.

During my final year as a graduate student, I was required to complete a sustainability internship, commonly referred to as a Capstone Project. Being the type who has always colored outside of the lines, I went the non-typical route. While other students traveled to Belize and Aruba for their sustainable tourism internships, I tracked and followed the expedition of an incredible group of performance artists - a nomadic theatre collective called Caravan Stage - traveling from port to port along the Gulf of Mexico (weaving through major hurricanes Maria, Irma and Harvey). The entire experience was truly unlike anything I had ever witnessed - a nighttime seaside play telling a tale with at least five meanings, a dark story woven in hope and metaphor, secretly saying the 'silent parts out loud'. I had to find some way to measure the impact of their message. I hoped to lower their impact as tourists, while amplifying and tracking the reach of that message - which we did together, all while making the entire tour paperless (see Adventure Two).

The production Nomadic Tempest involves the theme of Climate Change with several parts of the production spoken in five different languages, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Indigenous Salish. It is an epic tale of four monarch butterflies from desperate corners of the globe, displaced by climate change, searching for a new home.

This performance happened cross the deck and high above the 110 foot Amara Zee Ship and included actors, dancers, musicians, and more. While observing seaside audiences react to the tale of Nomadic Tempest, performed (think cirque du soleil) atop a 100' wooden sailing barge doubling as a stage, i thought to myself...

"Hmm.. some day during a global pandemic I will try to explain this wild situation in a not so typical newsletter about sustainability, nervously attempting to convey a larger point, which many may not fully grasp unless they read last week's "interconnectedness" post."

...of course I didn't think that at the time..

What I did think at the time was that this production seemed to have no way of finding out how their performance resonated with the audience after they left. This left me with the notion that a feedback component was needed to see the effectiveness of the message.

During the project process I am describing for you, I began to dive into data collection and the science/art of creating meaningful survey questions.? I dove even deeper into systems thinking and the lifecycle of messaging in sustainability and I became captivated by the concept of the butterfly effect and helping a traveling theatre group go paperless in the age of climate chaos. But first, a little bit about how data collection became integral to my thought process and what it was for me before I began measuring sustainability, for context.

Let's try to wrap our minds around this learning experience/ experiment and most relevant takeaways from my 75 page report in an 5 minute read. Shall we?

Injection of Hope - Enter Caravan Stage

Caravan Stage Company is a nomadic theatre production collective which is at home at sea. Everywhere they travel a new community awaits their arrival, adopts them as their own and soon after see them sail away but only after having already participated in the experience they orchestrate and perform -a truly indescribable multidimensional phenomenological experience. During the time of my project ending, the Amara Zee, their 100’ long wooden vessel was docked?in Victoria British Columbia. My internship project followed their Nomadic Tempest tour in mid-March 2017, starting in St Petersburg Florida and traveling next to New Orleans and then to Beaumont Texas. The ship was then transported through the Panama Canal via the deck of a larger ship and taken to British Columbia, where they continued to perform in Victoria, B.C and then onto Gibsons, B.C.?I personally participated in seven shows in St Petersburg and attended 29 more shows virtually.

As a side note, try to remember the political climate of the time.? During these days, the Trump administration had removed every single mention of "Climate Change" from the EPA website (I backed it up here, at the time).??As you might imagine, this made research regarding specifics quite a challenge. As previously mentioned, 2017 was the UNWTO Year for Sustainable Tourism Development and my project would have a lot more eyes on it beyond my university, due to this.

Here were my goals for this project, in alignment with UNWTO #IY2017

It was also during this year that the Blue Community became recognized as the first United Nations Global Observatory for Sustainable Tourism in North America. Here, my colleague (then professor) Dr. Randle explains this proud achievement (00:22) while standing in front of the Amara Zee.

2017 was an interesting year for me, as a graduate student. In fact, my entire graduate school experience was quite different from other students.? As the webmaster for the school, i built an internship blog for all of the students to author from wherever they were in the world.? When it came time for my Capstone Project, I focused on sustainability messaging as it relates to Climate Change awareness in coastal destination communities, presented as a story and immersive experience.? I researched the butterfly effectiveness of a special type of communication system geared for dynamically inspiring awareness and action, while tracking the voyage of Caravan Stage. ? My primary goal was to make the entire tour paperless, eliminating posters, flyers, playbills, etc.

Importing a systems approach, I investigated a method for improving the current communication lifecycle in order to develop ways to both amplify the messages transmitted through their story,? ensure more awareness takes place by adding a feedback component which is intended to inspire more local action.? I looked at inspired action from the “butterfly effect”point of view - (ie. sensitive dependence on initial conditions). As we discussed last week, the less we know about a complex system, the more unpredictable reactions to small changes within the system will be. Climate change models continue to improve as we get more data.? In theory, a model for communicating sustainability message will behave similarly.??Here was the strategic framework current lifecycle of communication at the time, before my internship, as I saw it.

And here is the lifecycle after my internship:

Above you see the extended lifecycle of the sustainability message after introducing a feedback component and making everything normally printed, digital. Below you see the examples of digital assets. Much more on the inside the Adventure Two- Doing More with Less.

My hope was to begin with chaos and end with order. Climate change means different things to different people, depending on the context.? For those who do not fully grasp the science involved, it is a concept seemingly born from chaos.? The audience members chose for themselves whether they perceived the story of Nomadic Tempest to be one of hope or doom. In order to understand how audiences perceive messages related to climate change, we must assume that everyone who attends a show will not walk away with awareness. ? The goal was to separate the signal from the noise while implementing sustainable measures toward lowering the environmental impact of the production. Here is a playlist of the Nomadic Tempest Production...to give you a better idea of what I am describing.

In essence, the influence that sustainability messaging can have on a person can become stronger by gathering more relevant data regarding which types of messaging can become most effective, in attempts to inspire action.? As such, predictability of dynamic changes within a system improves when more data is acquired about the small changes which occur to parts within the system.

The overarching goal of my project was to simply introduce a new way to measure the relationship between the feelings invoked by the message and plans to act in new ways as a response to that awareness. In future issues of Sustainable Communities Newsletter, this will become very important to my entire process of not only building interfaces for teams collecting data, but for the stakeholders of any community as well.

In closing, I hope that you take away something very simple from all of this. Messages in Sustainability are all around us, begging us for our awareness and action. Although they may appear to be random and seem chaotic at first, at times calling all previous knowledge into question, they are in fact quite orderly. When a message is well received, awareness occurs, bringing a seemingly new order to that chaos. When awareness motivates an action, a small change occurs, nevertheless, a dynamic change to the entire system will transpire, rippling through internal systems both known and unknown.? The ability to predict and measure those small changes brings order to what is otherwise perceived as chaotic.? The ability to track and measure the result of these small changes is otherwise known as the capturing the butterfly effect.? The most butterfly effective messages inspire awareness which motivates action.? Many times these messages are transmitted in the form of a story or an immersive experience. In turn, the messages are either embraced and become motivators for personal action or simply committed to memory.? Other times, they are transmissions which are either not understood or become lost in the noise and result in business as usual.? Depending upon the strength of the story and the agent, results will vary.? In order to increase the likelihood of awareness to be converted into action, we must look at the lifecycle of communication as a system.? We must then look deeper at possible ways that the system can improve.

All of this will become perfectly clear in the weeks to come as I begin to introduce a data collection system that I've been building for 2 years for communicating sustainability efforts in destination communities around the world.

I keep an ongoing collection of Web Tools in a directory that you can both use and add your tool submissions. Below is a few of the coolest tools that I either made or used this past week. Feel free to share your favorite web tools in the comments.

Find Your Local Civil Leaders in One Click - This is a tool that I built for Blue Community assessors and students to quickly find their local representatives. Civic Information Lookup Tool?makes finding the contact information for your local civic leaders a breeze. Plug in the location information and get the info in a click!

Surveyor Marketplace RSS Feed Directory - Smarketplace Surveyor Market RSS Feeds make it simple to import land surveying related products into your own website. This site keeps track of all of the equipment and software deals posted by our Marketplace Vendors on Land Surveyors United. Visit?www.smarketplace.org?to visit the Virtual Mall for Land Surveyors.

RSS Ground?is my favorite go-to tool for getting content out into the world. If your website generates an RSS feed, you can pump new content into all of your social network profiles with the tools provided by RSS Ground. I use it for jobs boards, communities, forums, etc. You can even sync your social profiles on various platforms so that content shows up in more than one place. My favorite use of the tool is creating self- updating widgets that can be embedded into any website. They even have a RSS Reader which works in tandem with your widgets and feeds. See the?boatload of tools they offer here.

Return to the gateway Climate Strange: Choose Your Adventure post or Check out Adventure Two