• Swindon & Wiltshire Education, training and skills
• Thursday January 16 2025
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Berkshire-born climate stripes feature in New York design icons exhibition

An iconic depiction of global temperatures developed at the University of Reading and adopted across the world is to feature in a new ‘design icons’ exhibition at the world-famous Museum of Modern Art in New York alongside emojis and the first Apple Mac.

Created by climate scientist professor Ed Hawkins in 2018, the diagram shows average global temperatures from 1850 to the present day, with shades of blue marking cooler temperatures and shades of red marking hotter ones.

Updated annually, the reds to the right of the picture are so deep they appear almost black. A new red was created in January 2024 to reflect the “off the scale” global temperatures of 2023. Last week, The Copernicus Climate Change Service, part of the European Space Programme, confirmed 2024 had been even hotter – and the first year to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Now, Warming Stripes (2018-ongoing) will feature in MOMA’s exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design – which highlights design as an agent of change – alongside the first Apple Mac computer (1983), Shigetaka Kurita’s original Emoji designs (1998) and Milton Glaser’s 1976 concept sketch for the iconic I ♥ NY logo.

While the stripes are visually compelling, they also serve as a stark reminder that our planet is heating to dangerous levels, with extreme weather events like floods and wildfires wreaking havoc right now.

Meanwhile, unlike much exhibition art, the stripes are far from exclusive – in fact, the public are actively encouraged to share ‘personalised’ climate stripes.

The University of Reading microsite https://showyourstripes.info allows users to hone in on a continent, country, and even city to see the climate stripes for their own location using scientific data. Our main image shows the climate stripes for Swindon.

The MOMA exhibition opens on January 26 and runs until October 18.