Climate Change Needs a Rebrand

Episode 4 – Katharine Poole

Katharine Poole joins Eric to share how her skillsets as both a climate scientist and a brand designer are a perfect combination to craft better and more informed communication strategies for organizations and campaigns. She also explains why designers should reach out to climate scientists to collaborate as climate change needs a rebrand.

Listen to this episode on: Spotify, Apple, Google and other places you get your podcasts About our guest

Katharine Poole is a Climate Change Specialist and Designer with a Master's in Climate and Society from Columbia University. Most recently, she led the brand design for Twitter and climate journalist Eric Holthaus’ new local weather service, “Currently”. She’s focused on giving climate change the rebrand it deserves by integrating climate action with design.

On the web

katharinepoole.me
Ttwitter.com/katharinepoole

Music in this episode

The musical guest is Alexander Roman from the band Free Paintings performing "She's Got Me Riding" from the album Free Paintings for Sale.
Theme music by Casual Motive

Climate Design Assignments

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

Get Assignments Follow Climify on IG

« Back to episodes

Episode Transcript

[00:00:57] Eric: Welcome to Climify I'm Eric Benson, and I'll be your host this season as we talk to climate experts from all over the world. To help us design educators fight the climate crisis in our classrooms. And yes, I'm also a design educator. I've been teaching for 15 years here at the University of Illinois.

[00:01:21] Eric: But even if you're not a design educator, listening to this show, there’s so much useful information jam packed in each. That you too can learn how to do your part to help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, I'm excited to have on the program. Katherine Poole. Katherine Poole is a climate change specialist and designer with a Master's in climate and society from Columbia University. Most recently she lived the brand design for Twitter and climate journalist, Eric Holthaus', new local weather service called Currently.

She's focused on giving climate change. The rebrand it deserves by integrating climate action. With design. You can follow Katherine on Twitter at Katherinepoole. That's K AT H A R I N E P O O L E. And you can find her online at Katherinepoole. Me.

Katherine, it's wonderful to meet you. I'm glad that you're here. And so, let's get started really with the basics, you know, who are you, what do you do? And, and where do you do it?

[00:02:32] Katharine: I'm a climate change specialist and designer. I have a master's from the Climate and Society Program at Columbia University, where I studied. The intersection of climate and how it impacts the people, places and things that we all care about. Um, currently I'm specializing in brand design and content creation, some communication strategy for climate related organizations and campaigns.

Previous to that, uh, I was teaching climate mitigation and adaptation at Clinton University and also at a climate education nonprofit. And most recently and currently working with Twitter and climate journalists, Eric Holthaus', doing brand design for his new collaborative weather service called Currently.

[00:03:24] Eric: You're the perfect guest, because you know, both things that were, we wanted to talk about today, climate and design. And so h...