"The main message is that sustainability would help" – Reflections on takeaway messages of climate change data visualizations.

As part of a larger project investigating expert opinions on public climate change communication and the role of data visualizations1, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 experts in the fields of climate change, science communication, or data visualization. We also interviewed six members of the general public with no professional background in either of these areas, who we refer to as lay participants. In the following, lay participants are identified as L-1 to L-6 and expert participants as E-1 to E-17.

We used two example visualizations from online news sources (if preferred, translated to German) as a discussion basis and asked participants about the main takeaway message the visualization author wanted to convey. Example visualization 1 was also shown to 17 experts, resulting in a total of 23 formulated takeaway messages. Example visualization 2 was shown to all six lay participants and to seven experts, resulting in a total of 13 messages. For both example visualizations and an overall count of 36 formulated takeaway messages for thematic analysis, we have observed variations in the included contents and the length/abstraction of messages, as well as in the sensemaking process itself among the two participant groups, but also between lay and expert participants. This document provides an overview of those 36 takeaway messages formulated by the study participants.