Provocations: design and the socio-materialities of dynamic climates in the everyday

Adapting to the extremes of rapidly changing climate often relies on datafication, measurement, and calculation, resulting in ‘solutions’ modelled on business as usual. Rarely does the conversation about adaptation stray into the territory of everyday experimental practices that explore the social imaginaries of coolth, weathering and dynamic hormones. In this paper, we propose that interrogations of intimate scenes between people and things—where change is rehearsed—are too often neglected in design debates on climate action. Abby Mellick Lopes reflects on porous household objects designed for practices of coolth that have fallen out of use with the advent of air-conditioning and refrigeration. Alison Gill explores embodied wearing experiments within the architecture of fashion artefacts, for what they can tell us about the sensations of the weather to come. Katherine Moline asks questions about barely perceptible edges through a robotic wall mobile titled ‘The Invisible Threshold’ and tests whether we can recover a language of movement from a starting position of stillness and inertia. We propose these objects form coordinates for a new dialogue about the socio-materialities of the weather that reconnect embodied experiences, spatial practices and dynamic climates in the everyday.