Sensorial Language in Biomimetic Structures: Form and Media to Convey Coral Bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef

Abstract

Pressing environmental topics such as coral bleaching, are often difficult to convey in a less dogmatic way. Chief scientists, CSIRO and Inspiring Australia Expert Working Group are among a community of scientists who look for creative and innovative ways to promote science through emotional humanised engagement. Understanding aesthetics in the context of science is critical to emotional engagement which can lead to the assignation of value. Awareness can transform to behavioural change towards environmental conservation. While issues of communication in scientific discourse have been extensively examined, this research looks at communication through non-formal modes of sharing scientific knowledge. We examine the potential of the public arena as agency for humanised engagement and the potential of hyper-personal dimensions of technology-mediated language and cognition. The synthesis of the linguistic and the material through embodiment produces opportunities to enable effective learning and provokes new horizons of understanding. Our method will combine four keystones based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model to develop a language that encompasses the human sensorium, that is, the body’s entire sensory apparatus, to enable active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualisation. The language with be a rhythm of tactile, visual, audible and ambient stimuli to restore participation of the body and emotion in a contemporary discourse. Finally, future work based on computation, biomimicry, spatial urban interventions, immersive and interactive capabilities for embodied structures is proposed as a strategy for understanding aesthetics and abstract narratives in the Great Barrier Reef and the issue of coral bleaching.