Conference Agenda

Extreme heat is becoming a defining condition of everyday life in many urban and peri-urban environments. Heat waves are increasing in frequency and severity, and cities often amplify thermal stress through the urban heat island effect, material surfaces, limited vegetation, and unequal access to cooling infrastructure (Adapting the Built Environment 2023). Yet heat is still commonly communicated through aggregate metrics such as temperature, humidity, and heat index. A reliance on such metrics alone renders climate legible primarily through quantitative data rather than through embodied experience (McQuillan 2018).  

Heat is not lived uniformly. People encounter heat through bodies in motion, through effort, sweat, breath, fatigue, and the ongoing decisions that shape outdoor life: where to walk, when to rest, which surfaces to avoid, where shade or airflow can be found (NOAA 2025). These experiences are uneven, shaped by what bodies are doing (walking, carrying, working), what bodies can access (shade, water, shelter), and what places afford (vegetation, soil moisture, airflow, thermal mass) (Bramer et al. 2018; Adapting the Built Environment 2023). In practice, heat is often experienced at the scale of microclimates: meter-to-meter differences between a shaded edge, an exposed plaza, a humid pocket near dense plantings, or damp soil near irrigation or mulching (Bramer et al. 2018; Hemenway 2009).  

At the same time, many climate-facing technologies and communication practices still treat sensing and computation as the primary path to awareness: gather measurements, visualize them, and encourage decisions. These approaches are necessary, but they can make heat feel distant, something known through numbers rather than through attention. Data-driven systems often “disappear” into the background of everyday life; their phenomena become perceptible indirectly (e.g., “rising heat,” such as climate stripes) (Karkera and Griffiths 2026), while moments of breakdown, threshold, or disruption (e.g., “the heat wave”) become foregrounded. This produces an experiential gap between measured conditions and felt conditions. Two areas can show similar readings yet feel different because of shade patterns, radiant heat from materials, airflow, or the cumulative strain of movement. Conversely, small measurable differences can feel significant when layered with humidity, direct sun, dehydration, or social constraints (Parsons 2020; NOAA 2025). When engagement is centered on dashboards and thresholds, microclimatic variation can be flattened into averages, and thermal experience becomes abstracted from the relational conditions that produce it, bodies, soils, plants, water, built surfaces, and the sensing technologies used to describe them.