No Time to Discourse is an interactive map of procedurally generated climate disasters that reimagines a United States reshaped by endless ecological catastrophes. It is a map that invites you to explore a dystopian future America where every click reveals a new story of survival, loss, and adaptation. The result is a picture of a future that feels both imagined and disturbingly plausible.
What makes this dystopian vision of America's future so effective is the accuracy and variability of the hundreds of procedurally generated climate disasters that it presents. No disaster is ever the same. One click might bring you a tale of a wildfire displacing thousands in the Pacific Northwest; another might land you in a drought-stricken Midwestern town where water has become more valuable than land. The result is a mosaic of possibility, a reminder that climate change isn’t one disaster but many overlapping and compounding events.
What lets this vision down a little is the map's aesthetic. At its core, No Time to Discourse is an interactive atlas powered by Leaflet.js and Stamen Design’s watercolor tiles. I have no problem with this serene aesthetic. The painterly backdrop of the map stands in stark contrast to the content it delivers: procedurally generated disaster scenarios rendered through Rita.js-generated micro-fictions.
However, I do think that some effort could have gone into developing Leaflet's default markers and info windows into something a little more visually interesting. Using custom images for the map markers and designing bespoke info windows could have enhanced the sense of immersion and created a more interesting and appropriate disaster aesthetic. As it stands, the interface is functional but somewhat utilitarian, which slightly undercuts the emotional weight of the stories it delivers.
I also wonder if reverse geocoding might have been used to make the micro-fictions a little more contextually relevant. At the moment, each micro-fiction seems oddly unconnected to its location on the map. I have not used Rita.js before, but I imagine it might be possible to extract town and neighborhood names from the map and have these appear in the procedurally generated climate disasters in order to anchor the stories more firmly in their geographic context. This small change could create a stronger sense of place, transforming each disaster from an abstract scenario into something that feels more immediate and personal - an imagined event unfolding in a location that the user can recognize.
Despite these minor criticisms, No Sense to Discourse remains an interesting experiment in procedurally generated fiction - one that is worth revisiting, if only to see what new climate disasters it will imagine next.
Via: Webcurios
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