the end of the world and the beginning of a project

The first thing a few people did when they heard the subject of my final project was groan. In my opinion it was a good reason to carry on but also showed me how wrong it could all go! I said the two words that make my tutors shudder with thoughts of 'Oh no, not that again.'....

Climate. Change.

But being me I ignored the initial reaction and relied on the thought that my weird mind would come up with something to save me. Not that I just plucked the words out of the air, I did have some thoughts on where I wanted to go with it. And a passion about the subject you're working on always helps. The original brief I submitted to the tutors (don't bother nicking this idea by the way, important people. I'll sue. I could do with the extra money):

"Everyone is bored of the constant henpecking about the environment (by people like me)
No-one responds to nagging, it gets their backs up. so there’ll be no advice on reusing plastic bags, saving energy, being generally ‘green’ because everyone has heard it all before.
People need to be reminded of the dangers of global warming without just sighing and rolling their eyes.
The plan is to prompt people into thinking about the inevitability of climate change in a similar way to nuclear warfare during the Cold War (scaring them)"

My main inspiration was from the Cold War era when everyone was 99.9% sure they would be bombed and so prepared nuclear shelters, emergency food stocks etc. The government at the time issued pamphlets telling you exactly how to do all these things. The official atmosphere induced fear and made it all seem inevitable. So my idea was to stop the climate change nagging and to focus on what it will be like once the 'bomb has gone off' (the country has changed due to extreme weather) Instructions on how to survive once its all happened would hopefully make people think about the threat of global warming again and how it would affect them directly. There's always a bit of a 'it won't happen to me' attitude about things that are in the future. But bringing the future right to them could be like saying 'well, if you're not going to help now you might as well get prepared to do all this survival stuff instead'.

I planned to do this by designing a 'government-issued' information pack/survival kit to be used after extreme climate change has happened in Britain.
I was thinking of things like:
basic survival items
emergency action plans for different scenarios (flood, drought etc)
map of the new Britain once the icecaps have melted and changed the landscape
seeds of plants that could be cultivated in the new climate and survive

As I was interested in the scaring people to death route I started off my research by looking at instructions for building nuclear shelters, WW2 survival kits etc. When I watched When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs and Threads, a 1980s film about a nuclear bomb falling on Britain, I was not only terrified myself but also very depressed! Watch them if you dare...

Threads

When The Wind Blows
(had to watch it in about 9 parts on YouTube. Worth it though. Go!)

Then I had to research all the horrible things that are going to happen to us and the Earth and advice for floods, drought, extreme cold bla bla bla. I felt like I was going to have to run to the hills with my box of survival goodies any minute because the world was going to end.

When I began to do some practice illustrations about how to survive extreme cold I did them in the style of an old step-by-step guide. After wasting a load of time on this I realized that I may as well just be ripping pages out of various old books and putting them together. Design-wise I wasn't doing anything particularly different. My end-of-the-world mood was getting worse! It was only when someone mentioned in passing that my instructions book should fold out to be a poster or map that it all started in earnest*...

(*wonders where the name Ernest has disappeared off to these days)

Me and Ernest were working well now. I chucked away the idea of a box containing the survival kit and started on my monster project instead. When it was suggested that the booklet with instructions should also be used as something else I thought 'Why stop at one thing? Why can't whatever I design be used for a load of survival situations? Hm?!' I couldn't think of anything to disagree with myself so my brain was feeling pretty smug with itself. Little did it foresee the pain it was going to go through to get to that point!

My thought process in brief (am too lazy to write it all out properly and you'd be bored anyway):

- Instructions on one side of the poster/booklet, SOS sign on the other side...
- It should be on waterproof paper to withstand the elements...
- Why not print it on fabric?
- Could be big enough to be used as a shelter from rain and shade from the sun...
- If one side is waterproof then the other side should reflect the sun/heat...
- If it's reflective on one side it could also be used as a space blanket in the cold (one of those shiny rescue blankets)
- It should be portable so roll up and have a carrying strap on it...

So the idea ended up as an emergency shelter with instructions for different global warming situations printed on the inside of it, SOS printed on the outside, reflective on one side and waterproof on the other that can be carried around easily. Lovely. Now how exactly do I...?