On Wednesday, April 2, Skye Moret was the first person in the Interdisciplinary Design + Media PhD to defend her dissertation. Her dissertation, “The Scalar Complexity of Climate Visualization,” focused on how we can visualize the effects of climate change to increase empathy and efficacy.

One of the ways scientists can increase empathy and efficacy starts with the questions they ask. Say a scientist wants to highlight the effects of climate change for the public. They have to answer a few key questions: Are they interested in eliciting an emotional response from their reader or engaging with their reasoning? Do they want to highlight the immediacy of climate change or create some critical distance?

Answering those questions can affect the data scientists choose to research and the visualizations they ultimately create. A reader learning about global changes related to climate change – from the ice caps melting in the Antarctic to the polar bears floating on ice floes in the Arctic – can make it seem like a far-off eventuality. But mention local changes in climate, like the wildfires hitting Oregon and California, and suddenly, climate change seems much more pressing and present.

Moret’s interest in collaboration, interdisciplinary work and “[l]earning from the ground and collaborating and synthesizing information,” has brought her around the world as part of her PhD work. Her speculative design project, “The Sea Sees Us,” was part of the Media Mediterranea Festival in Pula, Croatia in late May 2024. Just a few months later, she traveled to Greenland as one of 11 participants for the Greenland Ice Sheet Summer School program, where she went “to learn as much as possible and synthesize (and visualize) key concepts to better understand the current and potential roles of information design in climate change knowledge exchange,” she explained in a post on Linkedin.

When asked about her experience in the program, she said, “This PhD research opportunity uniquely allowed me to combine my passions and professional background in both information design and marine science towards the contribution of valuable research in the context of visual climate change communication.”

Since Moret first enrolled in the PhD program for Interdisciplinary Design + Media in 2021, the program has grown to include more than 50 students. The growing number of students in the program, paired with the interdisciplinarity of the program has her excited about what comes next. “As we learn from each other in the program, the pretense of academic silos collapses and enables us to integrate the processes of design research across disciplines. Almost no researcher or practitioner explores and executes their work in a vacuum, and so I believe our training in interdisciplinary design research will only become more relevant and necessary as global complexities from climate change to AI development become more interconnected and urgent.

Importantly, this PhD program supports students from varied backgrounds and countries and this community composition cultivates respect for our mutual values that shows up in our design research work. Together, this interdisciplinary practice and intentional care embody the world view we hope to be advancing with our research.”