Climate Data Practices: A Research Approach for HCI and Climate Justice

This article introduces climate data practices as a conceptual lens for HCI research and design toward social and environmental justice. We offer a working definition of this approach, which we locate at the intersection of critical data studies and practice theory. Drawing from a collaborative and multi-sited study of activists, city staff, and non-profit organizations, we present six examples of climate data practices as a means of illustrating the approach as well as the diversity of issues that it may usefully surface. Through these examples, we demonstrate that a data practices approach foregrounds the local, relational, and plural qualities of climate data. Finally, we connect data practices to two related concepts—scenes and infrastructures—which together offer a framework to guide critical interrogation of the social and political life of data, and support the design of data practices that serve broader goals of social and environmental justice.