Life bio-graphics: design-based exploratory research for methodological innovation in urban climate governance research

Individual actions of practitioners and activists are crucial to achieving carbon emission reductions and improving resilience to climate change impacts. However, policy narratives have overlooked people’s complex engagements with climate change in professional settings. Few scholarly accounts of individual experiences of working to address climate change in cities inform climate policy because ethnographic and sociological accounts of climate change experiences do not lend themselves easily to actionable policy narratives. This article reflects on the potential of design-oriented tools we developed to research and communicate in the context of policymaking situated accounts of climate change experiences. We call this experimental methodological approach ‘life bio-graphics’. ‘Life bio-graphics’ combines biographic interviews with designerly thinking in a unique way to visualise life narratives. We demonstrate the application of this method in an analysis of four selected situated experiences of the development of professional careers in urban climate change governance. The use of life bio-graphics reveals the influence of place-based interactions on professional practice, as well as the generation of motivations through the multiple connections generated in diverse life experiences. The visual representation of life bio-graphics challenges linear narratives of biography, focusing instead on the salient moments (nodes) that get sedimented through experiences. Thus, life bio-graphics offer new methods to study how experience, meaning, and materiality become intertwined and impact professional practices, in this case, in climate change governance.