As part of the interactive poster sessions, three MFA students in Design—Ali El-Chaer, Rachel Jung A. Huh, and Iris Qing Zeng—presented research-driven projects developed in their Research Methods course, which emphasizes the integration of quantitative data and qualitative narratives as a framework for climate communication.
Ali El-Chaer’s project explored the disappearance of bird species in New Jersey, combining ecological datasets with regional folk tales to situate biodiversity loss within lived cultural memory. Rachel Jung A. Huh’s work traced her father’s journey to the Arctic, bringing together family photographs and scientific measurement imagery to connect personal experience with large-scale climate observation and data collection. Iris Qing Zeng focused on color bleaching as a visual and material signal of environmental stress, translating scientific phenomena into perceptible visual language.
Together, these projects demonstrated how design-led approaches to data visualization and storytelling can make climate science legible, affective, and socially grounded, aligning with RCEI’s emphasis on the human dimensions of climate change. In parallel, animations addressing climate change created by undergraduate design students were also on display, highlighting how design education at multiple levels contributes to innovative, interdisciplinary climate communication.
