Carbon city blocks

The problem is overwhelming, so forget the bigger picture. Let's visualize carbon emissions on a local level - and make it personal.

Long description

This concept is a sketch. In fact it’s a drawing, a 3D representation of carbon emissions. It’s about intuitive design and local identity, about your and your neighbours energy consumption. It shows the challenge on a human scale: the volume of invisible emissions that your own street is responsible for.

This project proposes to render a granular 3D model of the emissions of all the buildings in the entire city of Amsterdam: to create a digital CO2-scape that’s visible IRL at hundreds or thousands of locations. An engaging, innovative graphic design of gaseous city blocks, of color coded streets or of resized buildings, relative in volume to their carbon footprint.

So imagine this: Google Streetview-meets-our-energy-bills.

Next step: Don’t expect people to look it up online. Show it in the real world.

The resulting open source model can be used in a transmedial range of uses – whatever makes sense. Localized dynamic video in DOOH-locations? Could be. Integrated AR-layers in apps? It’s an option.

We would probably make a bigger impact with traditional outdoor marketing campaigns: using the model for printing automated renderings to generate unique, localized posters that show the emissions in that particular street.

This isn’t a citywide campaign to raise awareness in general, this aims to translate abstract data into extremely localized information – and in the end to connect to appropriate calls-to-action, partnering with existing initiatives aimed at insulating buildings and installing solar.