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Paper short abstract

By ethnographically thickening climate data through fifteen interviews in Delft, this design ethnography reveals heat vulnerability as relational and context-dependent, shaped by bodily capacity, spatial situatedness, daily activity capacity, social isolation, and socio-cultural sentiments.

Paper long abstract

Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) represent socially contextualized experiences shaped by factors such as housing conditions, work patterns, and access to cooling infrastructure. Despite this complexity, UHIs are predominantly understood through “big data” frameworks that privilege demographics over lived experience. This research challenges such top-down techno-solutionism by ethnographically “thickening” the climate dataset, documenting how heat shapes the everyday vulnerabilities of diverse urban dwellers and how they navigate their thermal realities.

Conducted in Delft, the Netherlands, this design ethnographic study frames heat through three analytical perspectives: personal heat experience, perception of heat impacts, and expectations of future thermal conditions. Based on fifteen semi-structured interviews and spatial analysis, the findings show that residents live in their own heat bubble. Personal experience dominates residents' narratives of thermal vulnerability, with limited recognition of vulnerability beyond immediate bodily sensation. Disconnect emerges between participants' high awareness of global climate change and their inability to recognize their own thermoceptive vulnerability.

Our analysis indicates three ways people address heat vulnerabilities: heat experience shapes awareness of heat vulnerability, relational perception signals environmental awareness, and sociocultural contexts frame expectation of thermal comfort, reconceptualizing vulnerability as relational and context-dependent rather than demographically determinable. While literature privileges demographics as the primary axis of heat-related inequality, our analysis reveals five relational factors that shape heat vulnerability: bodily capacity, spatial situatedness, daily activity capacity, social isolation, and socio-cultural sentiments.

This research challenges demographic determinism in heat vulnerability research, illustrating how ethnographic thickening of climate data reveals the situated, context-dependent nature of thermal inequalities.