“You have a few choices to make. How will you shape your climate future?”
That was the opening question of the Imagine 2100 team’s final zine—written after six weeks of creative research through Arts+, Duke Arts’ experiential learning program. Offered alongside “Stitching the Future,” an interactive climate choice quilt in the Arts+ and Doc+ final showcase this June, the team demonstrated the power of art to guide nuanced conversations and communicate complex ideas when imagining climate futures.
In the participatory quilt, the team posed four questions about climate policies to each visitor, asking participants to make difficult choices with no clear right or wrong answer. Each response corresponded to a colored fabric triangle that students stitched into a growing quilt as conversations unfolded around them. By the end of the evening, quilt blocks in every possible color pattern were strung across the room, visualizing the community’s hopes, priorities, and uncertainties about our collective climate future.
Led by Ashton Merck (Ph.D. ‘20), Program Manager of Climate Research & Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science, the Imagine 2100: Environmental Storytelling for a Warming World team set out to explore a central question: “What happens when research and printmaking come together to imagine our climate future?”
Zooey Jeong, Xuerui He, and Bach Tung Nguyen immersed themselves in climate topics that resonated with them, researching fast fashion, sea level rise, environmental justice, and data centers through articles, podcasts, and contemporary artists’ work. They collected environmental data with heat and air quality sensors, visited the Museum of Life and Science and Warren County—the birthplace of the environmental justice movement—and spent time at Duke Gardens and Duke Campus Farm.
We want to translate climate messages that feel more natural, feel more human when people approach climate questions.”
Bach Tung Nguyen (DKU ’27), Arts+ Imagine 2100
Team
Alongside their research, the team built a new artistic toolkit to communicate their findings. MFA student Lan Wei led the team in workshops on bookbinding, eco-dyeing, flower printing, cyanotypes, screen printing, and linocut—printmaking techniques that can be especially impactful for climate communications.
Ultimately, rather than simply presenting their findings, the team invited viewers into the creation of their final work. Their meaning was clear: we are all in this together, and shaping our climate future requires collective participation as much as scientific understanding. In the final quilted piece, each decision is boldly reflected in colored triangles. Red to use pesticides to grow more food. Green to ban pesticides to limit pollution. Yellow to build more nuclear plants to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. Pink to limit building nuclear plants to limit nuclear waste. Blue to turn empty city lots into affordable housing. Teal to turn empty city lots into nature preserves. The probing conversations during the process were an education, and the resulting mosaic its own form of research, showing the choices a particular community would make to build their collective climate future.
Meanwhile, across campus, another Arts+ team explored how artists contribute to research and development in an entirely different setting: video game design.
The Game Narrative and Acting, Story, and Cinematics project paired undergraduates Alicia Harris, Aidan Klein, Andrea Owusu, and Alex Wu and project managers em liptow and Rose Ansari with master’s students in Duke’s Game Design, Development & Innovation program, where they spent six weeks helping develop the narrative and cinematic elements of three original games. Together, the students wrote dialogue, developed storylines, created cutscenes, and shaped character performances that may appear in the published games.
Like the Imagine 2100 team, students found themselves working across disciplines. Guided by Ernesto Escobar, Executive Director of the Master of Engineering in Game Design, Development & Innovation program, they explored how narrative evolves throughout the game development process, expanding storylines across levels, practicing voice acting, and refining character dialogue through an iterative, collaborative workflow.
Video filmed by Rob Underhill and edited by Duke Arts Mac Fellow summer intern Mark Stout.
One of the summer’s highlights took place in Duke University School of Medicine’s Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory (K-Lab), where students stepped into full-body motion capture suits to perform scenes that informed character animation and gameplay. Using the same technology researchers employ to study human movement and biomechanics, Using the same technology researchers employ to study human movement and biomechanics, students translated theatrical performance into digital data that animators and developers could build into playable characters—contributing artistic expertise to the research, development, and production of interactive games.
Seeing their writing and performances transformed into animated characters gave students a behind-the-scenes look at how games are made and inspired the team to begin developing a game of their own.
“It’s really cool to see where the arts at Duke are going, that the programs here are thriving, and the new generation of arts students is rising up to meet the challenge,” said Aidan Klein ’26, a Game Design team member who also participated in the inaugural Arts+ cohort in 2024.
Arts+ also offered students opportunities to explore other dimensions of creative practice. The Illuminated: Education Through the Re-Creation of Historic Stained Glass team learned traditional stained-glass techniques while recreating a damaged window from Durham’s Temple of Praise Fellowship Church, preserving both craftsmanship and local history.
Meanwhile, the Duke Arts Presents Administration Team worked behind the scenes of a presenting arts organization, supporting Arts on East performances, We the People arts activations, the launch of the upcoming Duke Arts Presents season, and the creation of Duke Arts Dialogues, a new alumni interview series currently in development.
Together, the four projects demonstrate the breadth of Arts+: whether translating climate research into participatory art, shaping stories for interactive games, preserving historic craft, or connecting audiences with the arts, students spent the summer immersed in creative practice, infusing arts into research and innovation to increase understanding and collaboration across disciplines.
Arts+ is a six-week experiential learning summer program from Duke Arts led by Anna Wallace, Duke Arts student engagement manager. Projects change annually and are announced in early spring. For updates on new programs and application deadlines, subscribe to the Duke Arts Weekly newsletter.