In an era of climate crisis, what are the space agencies that we need and want? For the last five years, Sophie ‘Soph’ Dyer has been part of the design, tech, and pedagogy project, open-weather. Open-weather was set-up by geographer Sasha Engelmann and Soph in London in 2020 but has expanded to become a patchy planetary network of 100+ DIY Satellite Ground Stations. This network has recorded extreme weather, political climates, and the death of the last NOAA polar-orbiting weather satellites, to transmit open-access, analog weather images. Soph has come to understand open-weather as a feminist space agency. For this talk, they speculate about other space agencies that might exist elsewhere, under different conditions. How might they help us to navigate the climate crisis in ways that join up knowledge with responsibility? How might they alter our perception of the planet, and so our relations to it?

Sophie Dyer is a designer, educator, and one half of the feminist collective, open-weather. Their work explores feminist and anticolonial approaches to the weather and climate, and social justice issues more broadly. They combine participatory and investigative methods to create digital archives and tools, evidentiary models and maps, speculative fiction and workshops. As open-weather, Soph co-created accessible resources for DIY satellite imagery reception and decoding. They bring extensive experience of working at the intersection of design and human rights. Until 2023, Soph was part of Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, where they led the organization’s crowdsourcing initiative to create the first city-wide map of surveillance cameras in New York City, which then was used to sue the NYPD. Soph is an Advisor to Forensic Architecture and leads the postgraduate studio, Critical Cartographies, at Design Academy Eindhoven. Experiments in collaboration and pedagogy run throughout their practice.