Send message to Contributors

Short Abstract

From campfires to future sense-making spaces: we envision citizen science where citizens are equal partners in knowledge generation, weaving human and more-than-human perspectives into shared imaginaries that guide decisions, nurture dialogue, and shape resilient, just futures.

Abstract

Once, we gathered in caves and around campfires, telling stories to explain the stars and the storms. Later, we met in the agora to debate, in salons to speculate, in laboratories to measure.

Today, as we face climate, technological, and geopolitical upheaval, we stand at another threshold. We need new sense-making spaces where citizens, scientists, artists, policymakers, businesses, and more-than-human actors come together not just to observe the world, but to imagine it anew.

In this vision of citizen science, the roles of expert and layperson dissolve. A fisherman’s knowledge of tides, a child’s experience of heat in her bedroom, a forager’s observations of decline; all are recognised as insight and wisdom. Citizen scientists are not “helpers” but equal partners whose lived experience are crucial to understanding and adapting to change. Citizen science can become a driver for co-creating these futures. By building a shared knowledge base, participation becomes reciprocal and influential in policy and planning.

Our greatest challenge is not technological but imaginary. We lack compelling stories of the futures we wish to inhabit. Drawing inspiration from Waag’s activities in the T-Factor project, we envision temporary (urban) sites as experimental commons where data, art, stories, and dialogue converge to shape shared imaginaries and guide decisions.

Here, sensing devices become campfires, dashboards become salons, algorithms listen as well as calculate. More-than-human voices; trees, rivers, migrating birds, help guide our actions.

Perhaps the discoveries that matter most will not be what we measure, but what we dare to imagine, together.