Abstract

The production of climate services is rooted in traditional academic and capitalist powers-structures and knowledge hierarchies. As climate services has developed the role co-production has been highlighted as essential for ensuring that the services created are both usable and relevant. Methods are now used that seek to mitigate entrenched power dynamics, to recognise the value of different forms of knowledge, and to genuinely have the end service fit the needs of those who will be using it rather than external preconceived ideas. The continuing struggles in successfully implementing co-production led to the question of what could be learned if the scientific values of legibility and utility were decentralised.

Representations of climate data in climate services condense time into a snapshot, a graphical representation where the success of the medium is how precisely and quickly it can be understood and how well future information can be integrated into it or compared to it. Textiles, the speed of their production tied deeply into the industrial, capitalist, globalist, exploitative past, present and future that has created and is the anthropogenic era, are loaded with meaning both in the objects produced and their process of production. The Knitting Map and Tempestry both are artworks that describe climate through utilising collective craft work but for different purposes, through different processes of collective engagement, and with different intents.

Exploring these works as though they were climate services  may offer insights into factors such as who's insights are valued, the difference between described urgency and embodied activity on impact, the role of technology, and how to mediate between different values.