Airside were recently asked by EcoLabs to contribute to their Climate Roadshow, a travelling exhibition investigating and offering solutions to our planet’s many ecological issues.
Part of the exhibition focused on illustrating the 6 chapters (1 chapter for degree) of Mark Lynas’s sobering book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet and along with 5 other designers we were asked to illustrate the consequences that each increasing degree would have.
It is hard to create work from such a brief because anything produced from such a sobering source will inevitably come across as a trivialisation of the facts; EcoLabs fully understood this issue and wanted to make clear that the goal of these illustrations were to provide an emotive response to the facts and more importantly, the solutions, featured in the exhibition.
According to Mark’s book, an increase of the Earth’s temperature by only 1 degree would result in the island of Tuvalu drowning under a rising sea level. The book describes this point as a ‘tipping point’, so called because like a boat, once tipped, the Earth’s temperature would very difficult to right again.
Our illustration was designed to be a rotational image, depicting the two sides of the story. Happier times show swimmers diving into a cove, but on rotation the idyllic scene changes to show the previous swimmers drowning beneath a flooded island.
