As a research-based illustrator, I use drawing to translate difficult sociopolitical and environmental knowledge. I previously viewed my role as a solitary “gleaner”, an independent observer searching for alternative perspectives. However, this project transformed my practice into a collaborative production of knowledge. Much like Agnès Varda’s films, our work was shaped through continuous dialogue, moving beyond solitary observation toward a collective narrative.
Working together on the UAL Net Zero dataset shifted how I understood climate communication. Previously, my illustrations visualised individual human actions using simplified information to make the topic approachable. Through collective discussion and engagement with raw data, I recognised that climate change cannot always be understood as a single event or a sum of personal behaviours. Quantified data can unintentionally assign blame to individuals, even when emissions are structurally produced.
This experience reframed my practice. I now see illustration not only as a tool for accessibility, but as a form of critical translation that can expose systems behind environmental impact. In the context of climate justice and the UAL Net Zero plan, my role as a practitioner is to design visual narratives that reveal institutional responsibility alongside personal action.
Bibliography
- From Reading list:
Conditional Design (Lust & De Decker, 2008–ongoing) Conditional Design Manifesto.
The Conditional Design manifesto proposes that designers create conditions rather than predetermined images: process produces formations rather than forms. I understood this through the analogy of a football formation, the overall pattern does not exist in a single player but emerges from many individual actions occurring simultaneously. This idea shifted my focus from representing carbon emission totals to visualising the process of student mobility that produces them. When emissions are presented only as numerical outcomes, they tend to generate individual guilt. However, mapping how emissions are distributed across routes, distances, and institutional structures revealed shared responsibility. The question therefore changed from “how much carbon do students produce?” to “what systems allow these movements to occur?” In our ticket and movement pack system, the visual outcome is not a fixed composition but an accumulation produced by multiple journeys. Conditional Design helped me frame climate communication not as a moral statement but as a relational pattern. Within the context of the UAL Net Zero plan, the work attempts to show that sustainability is less about correcting individual behaviour and more about understanding the infrastructures and educational conditions that organise mobility in the first place.
Varda, A. (2000) The Gleaners and I [Film]. France: Ciné Tamaris.
My working process often follows a sequence of questions → investigation → structural analysis → translation → image, which I came to recognise through Varda’s approach in The Gleaners and I. Rather than treating her subjects as objects to be represented, Varda continuously speaks with people, traces contexts, and examines the conditions that allow certain practices to exist. This perspective influenced how I reconsidered my own visualisation of student air-travel data. Initial stage of the project, our group found ourselves only representing emissions as outcomes. Returning to the data, we began asking how the data itself was produced: why students move, what institutional structures require mobility, and how these journeys accumulate. Through this process, we recognised a parallel between the movement of students and the formation of geological sediments, both are gradual deposits created by repeated actions rather than singular events. Varda’s method shifted our practice from illustrating information to investigating conditions. The sediment drawings therefore do not simply depict carbon emission; they attempt to make visible the processes and contexts that generate it, aligning the work with a climate justice perspective focused on systems rather than individual behaviour.
- Outside the Reading list:
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway’s writing shifted my perception of climate change from a singular global crisis to a network of entangled relations. Her insistence on “staying with the trouble” suggests that environmental issues cannot be resolved through clean narratives of responsibility or technological optimism. This directly informed how I interpreted the UAL Net Zero plan. When carbon emissions are presented as individual behavioural choices, institutional structures become invisible. Through collaborative discussion, I began to understand student air movement not simply as personal travel but as a condition produced by international education systems, visa policies, and academic networks. Rather than illustrating catastrophe, the work attempts to situate viewers within a shared yet uneven system. Haraway encouraged me to avoid moralising imagery and instead design for situated awareness. The project therefore operates less as environmental persuasion and more as an invitation to recognise how environmental responsibility is distributed across institutions, infrastructures, and individuals.
Parsons, D. (2022) ‘The Plastocene – Plastic in the Sedimentary Record’. (Public lecture and research publications).
Parsons’ discussion of anthropogenic sediments provided the conceptual foundation for translating carbon emissions into geological strata. Learning that human-made materials are preserved in sedimentary layers, and can be used for dating, from glass bottles to World War II debris, reframed data visualisation for me. Emissions no longer appeared as abstract statistics but as material traces with temporal duration. This allowed me to position flights not as isolated journeys but as deposits within a planetary archive. I therefore chose black-and-white sediment drawings, using pencil (coal) as both medium and reference, so the images function simultaneously as data representation and landscape. The work shifts attention from immediacy to accumulation: climate impact is read as consequence over time rather than a single moment of action. This also complicates accountability. No single layer belongs to one individual, yet layers are unevenly produced. Parsons’ research helped me understand how Net Zero frameworks risk framing emissions as individual behaviour, while the sedimentary model instead reveals climate change as a systemic condition distributed across infrastructures, institutions, and mobility patterns.
- Design Practices/Project
Templo (2021) United Nations Climate Communication Collaborations.
Templo’s collaboration with the United Nations influenced how I approached entry points into complex climate data. In their project, the designers intentionally “flipped the data on its head” to create an immediate visual access point for a broad audience. Rather than presenting separate disasters as isolated incidents, they produced monochromatic 3D renderings that were collided and layered to reveal shared topologies, underlying structural causes such as infrastructure neglect or profit prioritisation. The images did not simply illustrate findings; they reorganised how relationships between events could be read. This approach directly informed our movement pack and ticket system. Instead of explaining emissions through a single infographic, we as a team designed multiple documents that must be compared and handled. Meaning only emerges through relational reading. Like Templo’s visual collisions, the tickets do not identify one responsible figure but expose connections between institutional movement, education structures, and carbon production. This shifted my understanding of accessibility as a visual facilitator: clarity does not necessarily come from simplification but from providing a legible entry point that enables audiences to recognise systemic patterns rather than individual blame.
Tapper, T. (2022) ‘Creativity isn’t carbon neutral: How complicit are agencies in the climate crisis?’, It’s Nice That, 8 November.
Tapper’s concept of the creative industry’s “brainprint” challenged my initial approach to visualising carbon emissions. He argues that design should not be evaluated only through its material carbon footprint, but through its capacity to influence behaviour. Advertising and visual communication shape desire, and therefore indirectly produce environmental impact by encouraging high-carbon activities such as travel and consumption. This shifted my understanding of responsibility within the UAL Net Zero context. Our project initially risked presenting student flights as individual behavioural choices. However, Tapper’s argument suggests that mobility is not purely infrastructural but culturally constructed through institutional messaging, aspiration, and educational systems. As a result, our work avoids assigning blame to individual students and instead reveals the system that organises movement. The ticket and movement pack function as administrative documents that expose student air travel as a designed condition rather than a personal decision. This reframed our practice: discussing carbon emissions is not neutral, and depending on how data is interpreted and communicated, design itself can participate in either reinforcing or questioning environmentally damaging behaviours.
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