Exhibition Behavioural Framework Design
Project Overview
Individual behavioural change is a core part of what should become an international response to the global climate crises to tackle mitigation and adaptation. There is a gap in the response to climate change that involves social sciences techniques and should be addressed with the influence of art-based climate change interventions. These initiatives can engage the audience throughout and combine cognitive and affective engagement, which are fundamental to successful behavioural change. Psychological models of risk perception can transform information into influential awareness by processing information analytically and emotionally. The emotional process is the most effective and essential for the decision-making process, in fact “the stronger the emotion the more powerful its influence”. The affective methodology has the strongest influence on values, beliefs and attitudes, and possesses the most potential of pro-environmental behavioural transformation.
The majority of people do recognise the existence of climate change but they feel it will not affect them personally during the course of their lifetime, furthermore they see it as a statistical value that is measured on large timescales, and therefore temporally and geographically extremely distant, hence irrelevant. The role of the arts is to channel societal efforts to respond to environmental change by shedding a new light on the issue and creating new entry points to create artwork and exhibitions that spark emotional effect. It is fundamental to use social sciences to analyse behavioural change results that come from art-based interventions and projects and understand how a possible audience interprets and understands such artwork displays. Art-based interventions can either be showcased as an exhibition or produced as community-based interventions to disseminate key insights within a broader audience of non-experts. Furthermore, climate change visualisations are particularly positively effective when able to mediate information and show positive imagery rather than apocalyptic visions that could result in denial, apathy, and resignation. It is crucial to address the showcasing of art-let climate change artwork with a bottom-up approach that allows a non-expert audience to be involved by sharing clear examples of participatory art initiatives to actively involve and encourage conversations within the spectators.
Project outcome
Based on the prototype outcome and research conducted, the results led to the development of a curatorial model as a framework with emphasis on experiencing, questioning, and self-reflecting. The curatorial process becomes a form of design itself that designs behavioural change through an exhibition in which materials and ideas are assembled to create a narrative that leads to behavioural change.
The framework can be adapted to various fields of behavioural change; therefore artwork is interchangeable and can be commissioned based on the rules outlined in the framework, and depending on the location and size of the curatorial work. Exhibitions whose goal is behavioural change should follow a path of three major phases, broken down in three areas to each guide the audience throughout the experience, furthermore the exhibition should include some takeaway object for the participants to become co-creators of their experience.
The phases of the exhibition should be as follows:
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Understanding the issue and the threat to daily lives:
Information: the audience gathers information on the subject matter, photography must be used to add a sense of reality and concreteness. The information given must be non-bias and neutral, to allow the audience to make it their own.
Awareness: the exhibition should allow the audience to become aware of the issue by giving a temporal explanation of historical development, causes and effects. Participants are here encouraged to become co-creators and active participants by allowing them to have a takeover to carry along the rest of the experience.
Understanding: in this phase it is encouraged the use of images that project to the future and shorten the geographical and temporal distance with the future issues based on the subject matter. Participants become aware of the issue threatening their daily lives as well as others and strengthen the notion of the “usworld”.
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Engagement, questioning behaviour, and emotional effect: in this phase the exhibition showcases a series of multisensorial installations that aim at emotionally engage the audience but ultimately motivate them to be active citizens. The installations should include:
A piece for understanding the magnitude of the threat and engage the audience emotionally by feeling overwhelmed.
A piece to allow the audience to touch and feel the subject matter.
A piece that involves their body completely, but ultimately makes them feel hopeful.
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Active participation and behavioural change: the model focuses on the ascription of responsibility and awareness of consequences, and therefore on the NEP behavioural change model:
Activism awareness: the exhibition should show how the issue is and can be tackled from a global perspective, so that participants are encouraged to think globally.
Activism engagement: the exhibition must break down actions that can be taken to become active citizens and change behaviour at a community and local level, so that participants are encouraged to act locally while thinking about the global aspect of the threat.
Behavioural change: in this phase the audience is encouraged to freely reflect on their experience and think about what are the actions they will be taking to become active citizens and therefore change their behaviour.