Through participatory workshops, Guillemette Legrand, a PhD student on the Make/Sense programme at HGK Basel, is investigating how climate models are developed, whose voices are missing from the process, and how technical infrastructures can be designed to be more equitable.
As part of the research project "Climate Cosmograms", Guillemette Legrand, PhD candidate in the Make/Sense programme at HGK Basel, recently co-hosted a series of workshops together with members of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre.
In the context of the TANC conference "The Apocalypse is Not Coming" held at the University Autónoma of Barcelona in May 2026, and of the Future Earth Annual Science Sustainability Conference held at the University of Lausanne in June 2026, the group hosted two role-playing workshop sessions that explored why and how certain political, socio-economic and cultural imaginaries are excluded from climate debates.
During the workshops, each participant took on different roles (e.g, lobbyist, modeller, computational architecture, etc.) to speculatively reenact how decisions are made in defining the climate future. The discussion was centred on a schematic pipeline that illustrates the different steps, actors, and components of climate projection infrastructure.
The workshop addressed how and where responsibilities should be taken on, and how accountabilities can be made visible throughout the process. In a second part, participants were asked to break the pipeline, identify space for intervention, and discuss which other actors, practices, and ways of knowing should be involved.
The participatory workshops form part of Guillemette's wider research into the computational infrastructures of climate modelling and ways of imagining climate computation otherwise. A next iteration of the workshop will be hosted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in the fall of 2026.