Inspiring Through Data – Infographics for Change

This text was written by Bernd Riedel, Co-Founder and Director of Ellery Studio, as lead article for the 28th version of the Malofiej International Infographics Awards yearbook published by the Society for News Design (SND).

Until March 2020 our news feeds were flooded with headlines on the latest climate catastrophes, struggles for racial and gender equality and heart-wrenching stories of refugees in search of a better life. And then all that got upstaged by a bat-caused pandemic, the end of which is still not in sight. The sheer scale of these crises can feel overwhelming. It makes us question what impact we can have as individuals — if any at all. And in addition to disrupting our social, economic and cultural life, each of these disasters by its essence clearly seems to indicate that life may, and perhaps should, never be the same as before.

So, who decides where to go from here? Political leaders, decisionmakers, and the economy will have their say, no doubt. But large-scale challenges demand decentralized attention as well. Everybody is affected by change, and everybody should have a voice in how to deal with it. Participation in public discourse, however, is only productive if people have some factual understanding of the subject matter first. Without some basic background knowledge, things can get weird pretty quickly. We got a taste of how far into the twilight zone society can move with the growth of populism and the stark increase in fake news and conspiracy theories entering the mainstream over the last years, culminating in January 2021 in the bizarre image of a mob led by a half-naked buffalo impersonator successfully storming the Capitol in Washington DC.

Decentralized knowledge distribution has been changing the way society consumes information for decades now. And the fact this phenomenon often materializes in the form of cat memes or TikTok videos demonstrates that everybody can take part in fishing for the attention of the interested masses — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

At Ellery Studio, we aim to push for transformation at the intersection of innovation, knowledge and design. To that end, we explore desirable futures, make them tangible and transferable, and reveal exciting new transformation pathways to get there. Using the power of infographics and visual storytelling is essential to our transformation design process: It expands on the traditional coverage of discourse-relevant information while providing low-threshold, easy-access formats. Infographics can serve as a communication driver and a transformation tool, in particular in our main areas of expertise, sustainability, climate change and the much-needed shift to renewable energy.?

?

An infographic coloring book for the energy transition

While the summer of 2021 hopefully brings progress in mitigating the effects of COVID, it seems guaranteed we will see yet another heat record along with possibly even more of the devastating wildfires certain parts of the world experienced over the last few years. Six of the warmest years on record took place during the past decade — a trend that will most likely continue and even accelerate. The good news is that, when it comes to fighting climate change, every one of us can make a difference. Just look at Fridays for Future, a major global movement that was started by a single high school student!

We wanted to draw more people into the conversation on climate change and the energy transition, and produce something scientific that is both emotionally engaging and easy to understand.?

But how do you get people to engage with a topic as abstract as the energy transition? You can’t expect them to read massive scientific papers or political programs – nobody likes to do that. And how do we connect with difficult-to-reach audiences who would never spontaneously read up on this kind of topic?

To bridge that gap, we combined our infographic story-telling with the simple, engaging exercise of coloring to produce the Infographic Energy Transition Coloring Book, in collaboration with our long-term scientific partner the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility (IKEM).

What it’s about & how it works

The book tells the story of climate change and the energy transition in 33 infographic spreads, from global emissions to the German energy transition, paying head to complexities like energy subsidies, power grids, and citizen participation. Playful illustrations and diagrams render these sometimes dry topics accessible and engaging.

?The book is packed with research from scientists and sector experts who usually write policy recommendations for the German government. The main idea behind the format is that, through coloring, people can casually spend much more time with the content and let it sink in. And even if you’re really just in it for the coloring exercise itself, you might still pick up an interesting fact here and there.?

Effective action on climate change requires us to inform ourselves and others to understand and implement the steps needed to keep our planet cool and live in a more sustainable way. The book facilitates this daunting process, and even keeps things fun and light!

But why?

Ellery Studio works primarily in transformation design environments: We create spaces for participation, cooperation and co-creation in order to move towards desirable futures. In this light, it makes sense to combine the knowledge we want to render accessible with engaging activities or innovative reading formats.

For us, this is the most direct approach to facilitate a shift among our stakeholders from passive reader to active knowledge agent. This term, used in knowledge management, describes individuals or organizations who store, retrieve, transfer, and apply knowledge resources. Given the light-hearted formats and our broad target audience, we call them casual knowledge agents: people, not experts, who form opinions, join the public political discourse and advocate for their conviction formed around the challenge at hand.

The book did exactly what we hoped it would, pulling people into the climate conversation in an innocent yet informative way. But we also noticed that the book had some unexpected side-effects, one of which was particularly exciting: it proved to be a door-opener to conversations with upper-echelon decision makers in politics and the economy. On the one hand, we were invited to speak at events and conferences in energy, mobility and science communication as a light-hearted pick-me-up in-between mostly alarming keynotes about the depressing realities that make up the climate crisis.

On the other hand, armed with a unique artifact, we found it much easier to approach political leaders without being shooed away by their security details: intriguing, charming, harmless fun, yet full of scientific substance. This was our renewable-energy Trojan sparkle pony, if you will. It helped us get into conversations with a whole series of leading German federal ministers and other political figures.?

The design process

In an initial design experiment, we created two infographic coloring book pages as a little giveaway for our partners at energy transition research institutes and climate protection NGOs, as we had always been told by these experts that they had a hard time explaining the sometimes abstract nature of their work on energy transition topics to their friends and family.

?And while we did a lot of user testing, trying out our ideas with our youngest target audience, kids, was the most fun for us. A four-year-old may be unlikely to engage with the contents of the book too much, but a parent or grandparent might join the kid and color in a page. In these settings, the book can serve as a framework to explore the topic of climate protection and renewable energy with family and friends. This is the Friday for Future generation after all, and older generations have to be ready to answer some tough questions from their juniors.

Same formula, but different

The positive multi-level feedback the book received convinced us we were on to something.

And after several media features, we were approached by another sustainability think-tank, whose mobility scientists wanted to know if we had an idea to radically jazz up some of their content on the much needed mobility transition. A great opportunity to further develop our innovative science communication concepts!

Abgefahren!

Agora Verkehrswende is a Berlin-based think tank that conducts research on mitigating climate change in the transport sector. They are developing pathways to achieve the Verkerswende: The shift in the transport sector from today’s fossil-fuel based mobility towards sustainable and fair alternatives. We were instantly intrigued. Mobility is a great source material for creative content and design. There are few phenomena which bring happiness and frustration closer together: the joy, freedom and convenience of traveling come up against the harsh reality of overcrowded streets, road rage and misanthropic city planning. Any good story needs conflict — and who doesn’t have a crazy or enraging anecdote to tell about the travails of everyday mobility?

Of course, there are numerous and compelling reasons to drive the transformation of the transport sector forward: Creating green space to benefit the many rather than building parking spaces for the few, improved public health by lowering urban traffic emissions and increasing cycling, efficient use of public funding... And still, there has been precious little action in this field so far. So we asked ourselves: what can we do to increase public awareness, and what unique format could fit this new story??

And so Abgefahren! — An Info Graphic Novel on Sustainable Transport was born. Abgefahren is a hybrid of a graphic novel, an infographics publication and a scientific whitepaper, and follows a mindset similar to that of the coloring book.

There are many fantastic scientific graphic novels out there: one of my favorites is the comic adaptation of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which tells nothing less than the whole history of humankind. To expand on the appeal of sequential storytelling for science communication on global challenges, we realised infographics were a must-have for this publication, too. The idea was to not only display scientific content and enrich it with infographics, but to make infographics an essential part of how the story is told, the background of a scene, almost a character of the book in itself.

Abgefahren! shares scientific insights in a new format designed to reach a wider audience and spark broader public support for sustainable transport. The storyline follows a family of three generations, from the young and idealistic daughter to the old and cantankerous grandpa, as they discuss and argue about issues related to climate change and the future of mobility. To avoid a patronizing tone, the story is told from the outsider perspective of the family’s know-it-all pet, Rudi the dachshund. Together, they discover that sustainable transport is not just a fad, it is good for the climate and can even be an opportunity to positively reshape how we live and work together.

The book contains 80 pages packed with facts about sustainable mobility, fusing content-heavy infographics with the lighthearted narrative dexterity of comics. We call this format an “info graphic novel”. To easily navigate between info and graphic novel, a bright neon pink spot color was used for the infographics, which provide readers with a visual point of reference and a red thread (or pink in this case) to follow throughout the story. The sections highlighted in pink are also the ones most useful in case of an impromptu discussion on sustainable transport, empowering the reader to use their voice with convincing facts, statistics and arguments. The narrative sections of the story are told in a blue and yellow color scheme. In addition to the main story, the book contains sub-plots crafted so as to provide individual arguments that can be easily adjusted for standalone use in social media, very much like a daily short newspaper comic strip.

?Abgefahren was also a proof-of-concept for us. Could it be possible to recreate the charms and impact of the Infographic Energy Transition Coloring Book with an even more obscure topic, the shift to sustainable mobility? At the same time, we challenged ourselves to reclaim fiction — all too long weaponized by dark forces in the form of fake news — and wed it to its yin/yang-esque counterpart: actual facts. In other words, we aimed to reconcile facts with emotions.

As for the impact of this publication, we were happy to experience very similar results as with our coloring book: media features, speaking opportunities, sponsoring deals for additional language versions, and new project opportunities. In fact, an English version, entitled Future Ahoy - An Info Graphic Novel on Sustainable Transport recently came out of the printing press!

In conclusion:

As designers and infographic artists, we have the capacity to make any topic appear more appealing to broader audiences. At Ellery, we found that using this power to draw more attention to global challenges like climate change or gender equality is incredibly rewarding. We have decided to embed sustainability and justice in our company’s strategy, selecting projects and clients that are aligned with our vision of a better world. While working towards that goal, infographics remain a classic and powerful tool in our design toolbox. By conveying complex knowledge in an accessible format, infographics can move the reader from the stage of passive awareness to empathetic understanding and ultimately, to active participation. That is the kind of empowerment we aim to achieve, in our transformation design processes as well as among our international readers, to help drive positive change.?

And while infographics are a classic tool in the design process, their style and format is far from set in stone. In fact, the art of infographics is constantly innovating and evolving, alongside the changing behavior and taste of readers and audiences. Reimagining infographics to construct new story-telling formats is not just an incredibly enjoyable artistic endeavor, it helps us stay ahead of the curve! As new technology and tastes are rapidly changing the way we interact with information, Ellery Studio will keep innovating infographic formats to ensure engagement and impact. If the creative experience of our coloring book and our infographic novel has taught us anything, it’s that there is much left to explore! An infographic pixel game? Infographic flash mob? Audio infographics? Infographic poetry? We can’t wait to see what’s next on our journey to make the world a little bit better, and a lot more colorful!