climate therapy at earth rising festival, IMMA dublin
There are certain projects that we work on that feel like a permission slip to play. It’s rare to be given a blank slate and the invitation to create something fresh and new. But that’s how Climate Therapy started.
We’d been working with Lisa, Strategy & Sustainability Lead at IMMA, to build the impact strategy for Earth Rising, an eco festival in the incredible grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Our theory of change enabled us to define the role we believed IMMA could play in the climate crisis - an ally.
We created three impact pillars, Communion, Action & Learning and began mapping out activations and interventions that would help us champion the incredible work being done by environmental organisations across Ireland as well as offer festival-goers opportunities to learn more about climate change and most importantly help people take climate action.
There’s a blend of curiosity and expansiveness that’s needed on a project like this one - a willingness to sit in the ideation space and see what comes up. I found myself thinking back to the work we’d done with Climate Conversations and, more recently for World Ocean Day for Schools. I wanted us to create something playful, a way to engage people in climate action that felt both personal and meaningful.
Climate action needs to be tailored for each of us. It needs to feel relevant, achievable and aligned with who we are. So we started exploring the idea of Climate Therapy —
How might we design a fast and playful intervention that offers personalised advice about climate action ?
The first thing we did was to identify the information that would be useful for a Climate Therapist to know in order to give good advice. We came up with three core elements —
How someone feels about climate change
What they value most in life
Where they live and how much time they could commit to spending in nature.
We dove into all the recent research around climate emotions and how they impact our mental health and the pathways to action that will help us shift towards resiliency. We returned to our work with Dr Pamela Buchan this summer and revisited the Schwartz Theory of Basic Human Values. And we read all the latest papers on the plentiful benefits of nature connection.
We designed three questions (one for each element) and, based on the research came up with ten possible answers for each.
And then we started to play :)
This phase is one of my favourite parts of any project - with ideas bubbling up and transforming into a scrappy prototype. I rushed to our local stationary store, bought a spiral-bound notebook and headed home, eager to bring the concept to life. I cut each page into three horizontal sections and started scribbling down the different answers on each section, with the top section aligned to emotions, the middle to values and the bottom to nature connection.
Suddenly it started to make sense. A climate therapist would ask these questions and use the book to flip through to their answers. We could provide suggested climate actions related to each answer on the back of each section so they could generate a bespoke prescription for their ‘patient’.
Then we asked ourselves, how does someone take this information home with them ? Sure, they could take a photo of the book, but is there a more playful way that aligns with the concept of therapy?
I remember, as a kid, loving trips to B&Q where I could race to the paint section and collect all the colour strips. I’m not sure what it was exactly that drew me to them, but somehow that memory popped into my head, and I started envisioning all these variations of answers in different colours combinations.
Inspired by the work we did with Dale College last year, we realised we could create coloured stickers for each of the answers. Luke jumped in and started sketching up prescription cards that would make it super easy to generate a tailored solution.
That’s the amazing thing about ideation - one idea sparks the next, and then the next and all of a sudden, the whole concept starts coming together.
I remember getting on a call with Lisa at this stage after sending her an email saying, ‘I think we’ve got something’. I excitedly showed her the chopped-up notebook and did my best to explain how it would all work.
One of our design principles for this project was to create something that could be shared with other institutions and communities. So the advice in our Climate Therapy book is useful for anyone, anywhere. But we wanted to add a local flavour to this very first iteration - so we asked Lisa if she could share some local advice for each answer. We added a QR code to the prescription card and linked to an online guide filled with tips, links and recommendations for Dubliners to take climate action. It gave us the opportunity to really step into the role of ‘ally’ and shine light on the amazing organisations and projects that exist in Ireland.
We shifted into production mode and persuaded our local printers to say yes to our less-than-simple print job, found a Dublin-based company to print the stickers and ran an online training session for the Scouts who would be our Climate Therapists at the event.
Two weeks later we headed to Earth Rising to meet the amazing team and set up the Climate Therapy booth. It was the moment of truth - Had we designed an educational intervention that could be facilitated by non-climate experts? Would festival-goers want to have therapy as part of their experience? Would their prescriptions feel like a good fit?
By the end of day one we were left grinning from ear to ear. Lots of very stoked ‘patients’ and confident ‘therapists’. Incredible feedback from festival-goers, young and old. And most importantly, witnessing so many people walking away with a prescription that felt like the perfect fit and a commitment to take action.
This feels like the beginning of a project as opposed to the end. The world needs more joyful interventions that help us shift into climate action and spend more time in nature. We need solutions that work across diverse communities and are easy to implement. And most importantly, climate action needs to feel accessible, relatable and like something we’d actually enjoy doing !!
Massive massive thanks go to Lisa for giving us the creative freedom to build Climate Therapy - this is the work that feels like play. And of course to the Irish Scouts who volunteered over the weekend to become Climate Therapists - huge congrats on being awarded your Sustainability Badges. You guys rock.