Connected Worlds
A new immersive public experience on sustainability science and systems thinking in the restored Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science.
What is Connected Worlds?
Connected Worlds is the largest, fully interactive, immersive, public museum experience on the science of sustainability, It opened in the New York Hall of Science’s landmark Great Hall in 2015. Through tracking visitor movement and interaction throughout the 5.000 Sq. Ft. space, this computer-generated world helps deepen insight into how complex ecosystems respond to human intervention and the ways that local impacts can have global effects (view the video). We are grateful for the support of the National Science Foundation, Google Corporation, the JPB Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, NASDAQ, Xylem Water Solutions and Panasonic Corporation for their generous support. Connected Worlds garnered Both the Jackson Hole Science Media Award, Interactive Category in 2016 and the American Alliance of Museums Media and Technology MUSE Gold Award, in 2017.
The Science
Sustainability Science brings together disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and health to study the carrying capacity of local and global ecosystems and enact ways to help communities and corporations achieve an equilibrium between the use of resources and their availability on the planet. Importantly, to do so while minimizing the quality of life for current and future generations of living things. The basis of studying and understanding sustainability trends and resilience of human-nature coupled systems is the large-scale data and statistics that define the environmental, social and economic parameters of the ways humans behave in their environment and the byproducts of those behaviors. We built in characteristics of ecosystems (such as plant succession, evapotranspiration, wildlife migration, and others) to provide familiar hooks into the four computer generated biomes. Collaborators included the Center for Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Yale Cooperation Lab, NYU CREATE Lab, Harvard University School of Engineering, and TERC.
The Great Hall.
The Great Hall is New York Hall of Science’s main exhibition hall and a landmark structure designed by Wallace Harrison for the 1964 World's Fair. Its 100 foot curvilinear walls contain over 5,000 stained glass dalle de verre panels. During the World’s Fair it housed an exhibit by Martin-Marietta on space travel and featured Frank Capra’s last film Rendezvous in Space. Restoration of the structure was funded by the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, The City Council and the Office of the Queens Borough President (view the video). We were fortunate to have direct cooperation with the Architects from Ennead and City contractors to design and build the infrastructure for Connected Worlds, which included data and power distribution, data processing facilities, and reinforcement and construction of a large-scale truss suspended from the ceiling to house over two dozen high-flux projectors,and sensors for the Connected Worlds work in the space during renovation, Collaborators in building this complex and innovative infrastructure included Panasonic Corporation, Big Show, and Moey Incorporated. See the section on Architecture for more information on major renovation efforts for the New York Hall of Science and my role in bringing innovation in infrastructure and exhibitions for the science center.
Why Am I Doing It?
There is a strong and urgent need for the public and policymakers to better understand sustainable development and be able to grasp the complexities of the way human and natural systems couple and respond to each other. As the effects of climate change, the burgeoning and increasing urbanization of human populations, and shrinking resources increasingly impact social, economic, environmental and political systems; we are all called upon to make difficult decisions, trade-offs, and transform our perception of what it means to be part of the human species on planet Earth. Connected Worlds helps visitors understand their intimate relationship to the vital environmental systems upon which they depend.
Cyberlearning.
Leveraging my background in the coupling of complex human and natural systems, and the amazing socio-environmental work that the Columbia Earth Institute team (Center for International Earth Science Information Network, or CIESIN) brought to the project, we worked to bridge the knowledge about environmental science visitors bring to the experience with an understanding of the complexity of dynamic systems as they apply to the interactions and behaviors across social and environmental systems. Importantly, we wanted to know how groups of visitors work together, cope with, cooperate, or compete for resources when posed with sharing a limited resource, in this case, water. To achieve healthy biomes demands that a dynamic equilibrium be achieved. We had the privilege of working with the design and computer programming team from Design I/O to develop a remarkably robust open world experience for our visitors along with a visualization of large-scale data from the experience (view the experience and an encyclopedic guide).
What's Next?
Because sustainability and systems science are unfamiliar to most visitors, and most of us were trained throughout our school years to understand nature by reducing it to pieces, I made certain that we designed Connected Worlds to stream extensive amounts of data from the experience that could be structured and analyzed to understand how groups behave, share knowledge, and collaborate or compete during their experience. These data provide a kind of real-time dashboard that can interactively present the trajectory of the experience to the participants to do their own reflection and make observations about the session in which they are participating. This infrastructure also allows us to experiment with new kinds of facilitation that might inform how to create a richer experience for visitors that might even elicit them to generalize some of what they learn to political choices, activism, purchasing decisions and perhaps more sustainable behaviors in their day-to-day lives. The research team, led by Leilah Lyons, investigates ways that data visualization can be used to facilitate and scaffold learning about complex human-environmental interactions (ACM Digital Library and ESSIL.
This work has spawned a number of publications and presentations. Most recently, work in facilitation of Connected Worlds using machine learning (AI) to assist Explainer Corps members in identifying and intervening when visitors are stuck or having difficulty interpreting the complex interactions in ways that inform their subsequent behaviors. Results of studies are ongoing but more information can be found in the papers and presentations section. I will try to keep updating as more presentations and papers come out.
Connected Worlds is supported through NSF Division of Information & Intelligent Systems Award Numbers 1123832, 1623091, and 1822864. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.