In GREENGAGE we work from the assumption that knowledge with power to create meaningful change is situated and relational.
With our pilots, we want to support local developments – from neighbourhoods to provinces – towards net zero, making data with communities to reflect the actual conditions that shape people’s environments in specific places at the time. Guided by principles of a just transition, we explicitly acknowledge that people might experience the same place differently.
For us it is central to generate this data in ways that bring these different perspectives in dialogue, building community rather than extract from it or fuel division or competition.
This pushes us to develop socio-technical infrastructures that assemble hardware, software and practices of data co-creation in ways that:
- generate data recognised as legitimate by decision makers,
- create experiences and outcomes that are meaningful and useful for communities,
- and support data-based observations of environments by people that are affected by changes.
We are doing that to inform collective action, making a just transition a collaborative endeavor.
This core assumption is what led us to develop the Conversation Station as a data generator for place-based Civic Observatories we are prototyping within the GREENGAGE.
Why we built the Conversation Station
In Bristol (and in most European cities) public consultation tends to ask what suits the existing vision for the future, often pre-defined by authorities and their frameworks for evaluation, assuming in advance what counts as relevant and valid knowledge. Locals are usually asked to “give feedback” – but only within the parameters that were already decided elsewhere and that often turn out to be unrelated to people’s everyday lives and thus, meaningless to assess the impact on health, wellbeing and other matters of public concern.
The inadequacy of consultation is then reproducing the hierarchy of knowledge and power, manifests data bias and determines related funding streams – all to continue the domination of public authorities in shaping communities’ futures. People who are affected by developments too often are not enabled to be part of meaningfully creating these changes themselves, and in consequence might feel disconnected and alienated, with the big risk for authorities to fuel mistrust in their services and the erosion of democratic cultures over time. Those who can, stand up for themselves, disagree on what’s done to them and make use of their right as citizens or inhabitants of a future place, articulated in protests or through taking on the challenge for innovating in fairer ways themselves. Others might resign, losing hope and agency and the will to engage at all.
This dynamic can be seen in Bristol, where Bristol Civic Observatory seeks to respond to the conflict manifested around the public discourse on “co-design” and implementation of East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme. Here we use co-creative action research as a gesture of restorative practice: Together with our GREENGAGE Ambassador, the Conversation Station (CoSta), we go out and turn people’s voices into data. We want to make communities be genuinely listened to by those who draw their futures from behind their desks, enabling public authorities to hear what they currently cannot hear: lived experiences on their own terms, not as “responses” to someone else’s checkboxes.
What is the Conversation Station?
We roll out a mobile, welcoming, situationally adaptable recording booth. It meets people where they are: in the streets, in community spaces and pubs.
People put on noise cancelling headphones and instantly enter a focused space where they can hear themselves and others clearly. The facilitator listens, doesn’t rush, asks open questions and holds an emergent conversation.
We prototype public engagement beyond “content harvesting.” We seek to cultivate collective modes of listening and this needs technology that is developed together with those who are engaging with it and help testing it as an instrument for community-led knowledge co-creation and local planning.
Co-development in Bristol
The first prototype was designed and built by Javi and Julia at KWMC Factory.
Together with Annali, we tested during the BS5 Art Trail, then Big Up Barton Hill where Young People from Barton Hill ran the station themselves and asked their peers what living in Barton Hill meant to them.
Those tests enabled us to open nuanced conversations about the impact of the Liveable Neighbourhood trial on local communities and the generated voice data reflects the impact on people’s everyday life beyond the interest in active travel.
To bring the Conversation Station into our research, we’ve been drafting a dataflow that treats voice as data in accountable ways, so that community knowledge can inform the design of our action research itself, as well as generating insights we are asked to bring into policy making and public discourse.
Testing as GREENGAGE Ambassador in Copenhagen
Milipunkt Amager invited us to test the CoSta in their own contested mobility futures. Our partners had the mandate to feed into the local traffic plan, as it was envisioned to be co-created with citizens, similar to East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme which after widespread critique on the actual co-design and implementation of the scheme, is still conflictual.
We took the Bristol prototype to Denmark. We popped up on the street, at a playground and inside a library. We focussed the conversations on things that people might miss in their neighbourhoods, but also on how they desire to live better there.
During testing our Ambassador, we learned that cultural specifics and spatial code matter: the same hardware expresses differently in different localities, and needs to be adjusted for each place, its communities, semiotics, and rhythms so that it actually can speak and listen to people.
And that is the point of a GREENGAGE Ambassador: Ambassadors do not “roll out a tool”, follow a process that was successful elsewhere – they adapt tools, methods, practices to interact with local contexts and facilitate the emergence of knowledge ecologies in relational and culturally responsive ways.
Glimpsing another application: The Festival of Social Science
After testing in Copenhagen, we were thrilled to be invited to use the Conversation Station to facilitate knowledge exchange at the Festival of Social Science in Bristol (Triodos Foundation, Oct 2025). Here with another mission, and format:
The CoSta was inviting people to talk about their work: how grassroot initiatives support abundance in their community, how they face the same structural blockages and how tech-aided infrastructures (including AI) can be built, governed and maintained to scale solidarity and collaboration. Here we worked with CoSta as an Ambassador for mutual support and solidarity, enabling cross-organisational knowledge exchange between local actors of alternative economies. They supported a temporary public where diverse groups realised: we are experiencing the same constraint conditions. And we turned this into data that can help with resourcing collective action.
This is aligning with one of the core ambitions of GREENGAGE: to enable communities to recognise themselves not just as local publics but as part of a wider community of practice that could influence how civic tech infrastructures are made to drive social-ecological change and shape policy through community data.
Why this matters for place-based transition efforts towards just futures
With these small scale testings we seek to explore the capabilities of our tool and generate transferable findings: What if we would invest in infrastructures that draw on listening for creating situated knowledges and actions?
The CoSta is not a gadget. It is a civic research instrument and our GREENGAGE ambassador, helping us to:
- expand meaningful participation and reach of diverse publics
- strengthen capacity to articulate lived experience
- generate richer data for evaluation and learning across communities and places.
This is the level of innovation we need in climate transition governance: not “better messaging” but better relational infrastructures that help us make sense of change together.
