Climate of Change at OMSI

Climate of Change takes an innovative approach to climate science by asking the question: how do we counteract the grief, hopelessness, and anxiety people feel about climate change, while creating space for connection, agency, and hope? Rather than solely providing information about climate change, we designed the exhibition for the emotional experience of encountering it—and how that experience can shape a person’s willingness and ability to engage.

This bilingual exhibition presents climate science holistically within an immersive setting that allows visitors to explore the relationships between people, environments, and each other—discovering connections, innovations, and resilience to change through interactive exhibits, immersive experiences, environmental design, and with space to rest and reflect.

Grounded in stories from across Oregon and Washington, the conceptual and emotional journey of Climate of Change unfolds around four stages:

1. HEART: Start with the heart—establish caring and connection to locally and regionally relevant impacts;

2. HEAD: Feed the mind—build curiosity and confidence with climate science learning;

3. HOPE: Show solutions—invoke hope with real-world action and resilience; and

4. HAND: Call to action—spark motivation, emphasizing community-level action and personal engagement.

Converging science, art, and the humanities, a gallery created in partnership with Oregon State University’s PRAx Center, integrates fine art, performance, music, and literary art, which will rotate out annually with a new climate related theme. We know art experiences are effective entry points to science learning, and artistic expression is an important outlet for communicating perspectives and values related to climate change. Including these elements in our design creates powerful pathways to building hope and resilience.

An essential part of our design approach was co-creation with project partners, centering community voices telling their stories of climate action in their own words. This shifts community participation from consultation to content co-ownership, helping visitors encounter climate change through regional experiences, knowledge, and perspectives, while ensuring represented communities see their own voices and experiences reflected at OMSI.

An example of this powerful co-creation involved our Native American partners informing the sightlines and floor plan. Local Native American youth advised us to keep cardinal directions clear; those pathways became central to the exhibition design and a metaphor for finding pathways through climate change. Rather than prescribing a linear journey, the floor plan gives visitors agency to follow different paths based on what they are ready to encounter. For example, after passing through a hallway filled with oversize photos of climate-related events, visitors can choose one of four directions: the theater with community stories, an immersive interactive environment, the art gallery, or hands-on exhibits about climate science. Each offers distinct ways to engage depending on whether visitors feel anxious, energized, curious, or reflective.

Our immersive interactive environment, Journey of Presence, provides a moment of connection with place on a personal level. Projections overhead and underfoot depict environments related to the Pacific Northwest: forest, mountain, ocean, high desert, and urban. LIDAR sensors track where visitors are in the space so that sounds and animated images respond to visitor movement and stillness. To reward stillness over movement, parts of the environment grow outward from where visitors are standing and create connections with others and to the environment itself. We co-created the experience with internationally renowned studio, Tellart, and Indigenous advisors from the Portland-area community.

As a counterpoint to Journey of Presence, we created a semi-enclosed space for Science on a Sphere, where lighting, scenic painting, and the illuminated globe allow visitors to reflect on how each human action is a part of global interconnection. Data sets that visualize Earth's dynamic climate systems are framed by two films created on this theme, told through an Indigenous lens.

Together, our design choices create an exhibition that does more than explain climate change: it gives visitors agency in how they encounter it. Visitors can move, pause, experiment, reflect, encounter art, hear directly from communities, or stand still and watch an environment respond to their presence. By integrating climate science with emotional and environmental design, regional storytelling, community co-ownership, and responsive technology, Climate of Change turns a complex global issue into a personal, locally grounded experience that builds understanding, connection, hope, and a sense of possibility.