When Data Becomes Play: Visualising Children’s Thermal Distress in Schools

We would like to use the Vizchitra space to talk about our experience of using a game to make an underexplored climate data issue visible. The issue is heat distress experienced by children in school environments. The talk will describe how we designed a participatory game to help adults understand what children experience during periods of high heat stress. The game was developed as part of a larger project called Heat Futures at 78° E which brought together a multidisciplinary cohort to reimagine culture, systems and everyday practice in a fast-heating world.

The core idea of the talk is that data does not always speak for itself. Some problems remain hidden because adults are far removed from the sites where they occur. Classrooms are one such site. Children experience heat differently from adults. Their discomfort is often normalised or dismissed. Therefore, the primary function of the game was to bring adults into the space of the classroom and offer a glimpse of children’s experience of school on hot days.

The game asks participants to inhabit the role of different children through personas. Each persona reflects a different set of conditions such as age, physiological vulnerabilities, and socio-psychological characteristics. As heat stress builds in the classroom, participants are required to address subjective heat distress with evidence-based interventions that schools can adopt. These include changes in ventilation, scheduling, rules, hydration, and classroom design.

We feel this is a crucial topic to address because we rarely think of climatic impacts from children’s perspective. Although heat is becoming a daily reality for many children, it remains weakly addressed in school planning and policy. Thermal comfort indices rely on adult (often male) bodies and rarely captures how heat is felt by children in classrooms. The project, therefore, is an attempt to show how data can be experienced rather than just seen and how the format of a game allows data to travel across disciplines and audiences.

The talk will be structured in four parts. First, I will introduce the problem of heat in school environments. Second, I will describe the data and research that informed the game. Third, I will walk through the game design and how personas and interventions were integrated into the game to make a compelling case for heat adaptation in schools. Finally, I will reflect on what this approach offers to community focused data work.

I will also highlight the process of building the game through a multidisciplinary team. The team included a visual designer, game designer, illustrator, educator, architect, and researcher. I will share how different forms of expertise shaped the final outcome. This includes tensions, translations, and learning across disciplines.

The intended audience includes data practitioners, designers, educators, and community researchers. The key takeaway is that data for community work can benefit from play, collaboration, and attention to lived experience.