The 2051 Munich Climate Conference

A speculative conference on climate change, bridging arts and science in the form of a live- and online event. Visit website ↗

Introduction

In the year 2051, THE DEPARTMENT has decided to organize an academic conference on the challenge of anthropogenic climate change. 30 years after the then-groundbreaking Paris Agreement came into effect, The 2051 Munich Climate Conference has the mandate to look back at the knowledge and discourses in the time of the first truly global agreement to combat climate change. T2051MCC will take place on 18–19 September 2021 as a combined online and live event, and be open to the general public. The independent theatre group, Büro Grandezza reached out to Moby Digg to design and create the online presence of this semi-fictional climate conference.

Challenge

The 2051 Munich Climate Conference bridges art, science and speculative thinking by staging the event as if 30 years from now and offers two scenarios for our state of the world. A utopian- and a dystopian scenario based on whether we have reached our climate goals or not. This way of future-thinking was an essential part of the design-concept. For the design of the website and overall branding of the conference, the challenge was to create a speculative, but also time-less design language. Next to this Moby Digg was in charge of creating an online space for the conference to take place in, in dialogue with the physical location of the event at the Bellevue di Monaco in Munich.

Approach

To create an online place for the events and its participants to meet-up, the Moby Digg team used Mozilla Hubs. In Hubs, the team could design and build multiple rooms, each with its own distinctive look and feel which resonated with the physical spaces of the event inside the Bellevue di Monaco. To make sure the physical- and the digital locations connected with each other, an exchange of objects, colours and architectural elements took place between both. Natural and artificial objects from the Bellevue existed in the Hubs rooms and vice versa. The online rooms each represented a different angle to the overall concept of climate change, following a common thread: the interconnectedness of all living entities on earth. The team also wanted the rooms to express the feeling of humankind being inferior to- and managed by nature instead of the other way around. Next to the digital conference rooms, the website of the event expressed an overall futuristic point-of view by including widgets with speculative weather forecasts and displaying an archive of newly developed species of plants and organisms not yet known in our current time. For the website, Moby Digg also developed a custom font, which expressed a universal approach to language based on symbols instead of known alphabetical characters.

Outcome

This resulted in the design of a speculative branding and website for the conference which expressed The Department as a universal organisation. The website expressed fictional elements, like speculative weather forecasts and a record of unknown species and creatures to aid the idea of the event taking place in a future landscape, different from what we know today. Next to this, the team designed and build a digital counterpart to the physical location of the event where people from all over the world could participate in the conference and discuss the topics presented, without losing any of the experience of the physical event, rather adding new experiences to it. To make sure people felt like participants online, the team also created custom T2051MCC avatars which could be used to dress up and become an integral part of the conference.