A Digital Learning Resource Fit for Glasgow’s Future Climate Heroes

Blog
July 11, 2024

Some words by Colin Spence, Founder of Material (and creator of VIDI)

As an agency that offers businesses support with their social and environmental sustainability strategies and communications, we felt that, in the year of COP26, Material needed to walk the walk. We needed to make a demonstrable positive contribution to the climate change discussion. As an agency – no client, no brief.

In 2020, the world was so uncertain with the pandemic, people had more immediate things to worry about than climate change. Understandably, it was not top on the list of concerns for the majority.

So, we asked ourselves, how do you engage the unengaged? How do we show people what is at stake?

VIDI was born of an idea to use immersive technology to portray Glasgow in the future – good and bad. Envisioning a Glasgow that had successfully transitioned to a low carbon future and a Glasgow that had failed.

VIDI is a collaboration between communicators, climate scientists, sociologists and digital designers. The diverse skillset of the team enabled us to create climate futures that were:

Credible: based on projections in available scientific data
Interactive: allowed users to explore what had affected the outcomes
Immersive: placed them ‘in-situ’ using augmented reality

The response was beyond what we could’ve imagined and, of all the groups that came through our experience at COP, the school pupils stood out as the most animated. As the Fortnight and Roblox generation, they embraced the digital nature of VIDI as if it were second nature.

As of early this year, VIDI has been adopted as part of the Learning for Sustainability curriculum in every primary and secondary school in Glasgow, available across some 60,000 i-Pads in P5-7 and S1-3 classes.

This is something we are all very proud of. It was always our intention that our work should be open sourced for the benefit of our community. For Material, this project exemplifies what it means to be a B Corp.

Recently some of the team visited a P6 class to show them our latest version of VIDI on our VR headsets. Before we began our demo, the kids gave us their own demonstration. They talked to us confidently about climate change and what it can mean for the future of our city of Glasgow.

We were genuinely moved by how much they had taken from VIDI, the good and bad futures, their favourite features and how they had started to apply these learnings through a number of related lessons.

We left that classroom filled with hope and optimism. We had just met our future climate heroes.