At KWMC, we love seeing how ideas travel and take root in different places. Earlier this year, Julia Costa Carneiro, our Research Lead, was working on a Conversation Station: a mobile recording studio designed to meet people where they are and capture community voices on the move.
What they didn’t realise was that they weren’t alone in imagining it. Javi Acevedo, based in Hamburg and working across Europe, was exploring a similar idea! Introduced through mutual friends, Julia reached out to Javi in June 2025, and a Zoom call soon connected their explorations, beginning their Conversation Station collaboration…
Prototyping new ways of public engagement: A Conversation Station for Bristol Civic Observatory
By Julia Costa Carneiro and Javi Acevedo
The GREENGAGE experiment
This was just after our partners from Bristol City Council had suggested spending some of their EU project money on a service of Strategising and delivering public engagement in the monitoring of the EBLN trial scheme through co-creating Neighbourhood Observation Campaigns.
They approached Julia (KWMC Research Lead) for coordinating and curating the Observatory and Annali (Praxis Research) for facilitating deep community engagement and the co-creation of stories with data. By then, we as pilot developers knew that if we take that opportunity, we need to respond to the failures in co-design and meaningful community consultation with a gesture of practicing restorative justice. Our engagement with local community leaders and observers from media and academia who had been generating data and delivering important research and input for public debate, were enforcing this thinking. In our Pilot Support Team, we started ideating different ideas. That’s when Julia introduced the idea of the Conversation Station as a data generator and started drawing a distinctive dataflow for this Observatory, dealing with voice data from storage to analysis, visualisation and sense making. The team was on board and we booked in time at the Factory for Chris Insgam to support Javi in the fabrication of the box and tinker together on how to realise what the Conversation Station should enable people to do for the research and how the instrument itself could interact with their audiences in highly personal, tactile ways and with agency calling through design and message.
Prototype: Conversation Station 4.0
So our approach on developing Conversation Stations is rapid prototyping, design follows function and small audience testing, reflecting together with dataflow co-developers on the test to then refine the prototype again. This is how Javi and Chris with input from Julia were building a simple interface according to what is needed to engage people in conversations.
What is the Conversation Station experience?
For us it is very important that people grow agency when they deal with tech. In this experiment, the Conversation Station needs to engage with their audiences in a research context, so we need to include all the required procedures of user evaluation and getting people’s consent for using their voice as data and material for art.
Once agreed, the participant leaves the audience and enters a sonic space that creates intimacy through wearing noise cancelling headphones and hearing each other’s voices as crystal clear and near as you can imagine.
Testing the Conversation Station with small audiences in Barton Hill
We thought that creating an immersive sonic experience was especially important for this prototype, as we are testing its capacity to generate space where people feel safe, so they can speak about their feelings and the impact of change happening to their neighbourhood and their everyday lives.
We started testing the first iteration of our Conversation Station with friends, partners and visitors of BS5 Art Trail, followed by hosting conversations at Big Up Barton Hill, where community ambassadors were onboarded to run the Conversation Station by themselves and later we handed over the recording studio to Young People who became co-researchers, asking their peers what they really care about in Barton Hill.
Together with our partners from academia, communities, tech industry and local authorities we are testing the Conversation Station as an open source tool that is an integral part of the full dataflow applied in Bristol Civic Observatory. We are working with computer scientists from UWE and a sound artist on an assemblage of these voices, sounds, noises, and whispers into an immersive sound installation and performative sharing of recommendations for local authorities in December 2025. This public event will be an opportunity to learn more about the GREENGAGE experiment, read and listen to our collective input to a new policy on Liveable Neighbourhood Schemes and immerse the audience in the Observatory experience as such.
We will keep on sharing our learnings from applying Conversation Station in the GREENGAGE experiment – follow us on socials to hear about our latest test and where we will be popping up next.
What does our prototype add to the KWMC toolbox?
Listening to communities in neighbourhood development has happened before, and KWMC has over the years become a key stakeholder in developments towards urban regeneration, digital inclusion, and social-tech innovation, ensuring that communities’ voices are shaping the futures of their places.
So, the real innovation we are adding to KWMC or Bristol Living Lab, is the composition of a dataflow that enables communities to contribute to all different steps of the process of knowledge making. We will share more on that on our GREENGAGE website. This dataflow is what we are currently developing and testing as “Bristol Civic Observatory” and the Conversation Station has rapidly advanced to our main neighbourhood research tool.
The assembled technologies and the careful position of critical human research capacity to generatively use these technologies, is helping to rapidly process data and feed back learnings to communities and in the further development of our narrative, but also of our public engagement strategy. With this innovation action we seek to draft Bristol Civic Observatory as an instrument for monitoring and co-designing transition governance and demonstrate innovative policy making towards a just climate transition where communities’ data can become the foundation for neighbourhood developments towards net zero.
Where is the prototype applied beyond GREENGAGE?
While our field of intervention within the GREENGAGE project is local transport and neighbourhood development, the Conversation Station has potential for applications in other contexts, generating data on what is important to be considered as part of public consultation. With this instrument, we are contributing to KWMC’s legacy of equipping local communities with the high quality technologies and skills development that are needed to be listened to by those who are making futures from behind their desks.
We turn your voice into data.
Keep tuned!
#GREENGAGE
#ConversationStation
Please reach out to us if you like to test the Conversation Station and think with us about an experiment for further developing our prototype: julia@kwmc.org.uk