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

Katherine Moline, University of New South Wales; Abby Mellick Lopes, University of Technology Sydney; Alison Gill, Western Sydney University
2024 Conference

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.

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About the author

Associate Professor Katherine Moline researches the dynamics between technology and society. Their research is exhibited at the NFHRI (2024-2025), published in the journals International Journal of Transgender Health (2025) and Design for Health (2023) and the anthology Dark Eden: Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture (Melbourne University, 2022). Their innovations in research methodologies have been documented in SAGE Research Methods Online (2022) and The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (2017). They are currently finalising the monograph The Radical Imaginaries of Socially Engaged Design for Bloomsbury (2026).

Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a design studies scholar engaged in interdisciplinary, design-led social research at UTS. Her research advances the critical role of design in addressing dynamic climates and promoting the transition to more sustainable cultures and economies. Her recent research Cooling the Commons explores the capacity of communities to respond to urban heat and the role of the built environment in creating socially just and liveable futures in Western Sydney. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage project Living with Urban Heat: Becoming Climate-Ready in Social Housing (2022-2025) and the ARC Discovery project Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: redrawing the circular economy (2021-2024).

Dr Alison Gill is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication Design at Western Sydney University. She is the co-convenor of the research program Urban Futures at the Institute of Culture and Society. She is a co-editor and contributor to the book Design/Repair: Place, Practice and Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and her research explores the many roles for design in mediating social relations and practices. On fashion and critical design, she authored “Jacques Derrida: Fashion under erasure” (Thinking Through Fashion, 2025), and “Deconstruction Fashion” (1998; 2020).