Participating spans across technology, culture and politics
Our research is always taking place in the concrete circumstances of daily life and embedded in the social-cultural context.
As a logical result, we focus on main cultural drivers shaping how people feel, live and communicate. Our work here is based on exploratory projects
“Participation” is one of them. This topic goes across advanced technologies and social media use; it’s key to political sentiments and esp. a topic with cultural institutions looking for involving customers.
Inclusion and Engagment
One of the key themes of the time is how to motivate, include and involve people to participate in collective formats and processes.
Participation is the format for moving things in a big way. That is why the key to it, to its driving mechanisms are in such demand. Engagement-motivating participation formats are crucial to initiate impact chains. In politics, associations or in culture, whether for activating for demonstrations, engaging member or attracting museum visitors.
That’s easy to say. But political sermons often only find shrugging reactions. Mass magnets like concerts and soccer are synonymous with passionateness happening. People are at the same time “besides themselves” and involved, touched from within. Here, something third is the medium in which the collective processes crystallize. Demonstrations succeed this e.g. when creating a material symbol with high emotional cathexis for the moving, e.g. “Hambi must stay” (Hambacher Forst protest movements 2018), in the historical echo of “Serengeti shall not die”. The collective framework must create the space for events for passionate experiencing this permeable individual collective images and patterns of meaning.
Morphological Approach
Re-formating participating
from surveys,
symposiums to
museum visitations
Impact Units
Go across subject and object entities. With “the crowd”, a summation of the many is like seeing the trees and not the forrest.
Driving Forces
These forces are “supra-summativ“ drivers – like a melody or a Gestalt.
Potentials at Threshold
The shared experience of coexistence of what is and what might happen holds up an energetic tension field, a space of possibilities that can turn into a societal logic of action.
Polyphonic Organism
This tension-laden, polyphonic “life of its own”, in which a driving part of the self is “captured” and moved along.