Our contributions are collected in several ways (online and offline) and saved in an online platform (the SenseMaker), which creates a publicly accessible, shared journal. This monitoring process and awareness system is based on the same sense-making methodology that was adopted during the New European Bauhaus co-design phase.

The stories are part of an open process known as “Mass-Sense”, which allows for diversity of narratives and experiences. It is particularly useful to understand how different people may see or experience differently the same phenomenon or thing.

In addition to understanding the impact of art, we may also see a novel, bottom-up definition of art to emerge from the stories, as in this exercise we leave open the definition of “work of art”. You are free to interpret what art is from your own point of view.

Making sense together will be the pre-condition to replicating and increasing beautiful, shared experiences through policy-making activities, commercial projects, artistic research, etc... We hope that we can all be inspired by the best the stories to try to make them happen in our own places, while we will encourage advocacy organizations and policy makers to find insights in the stories to develop policy that work best for all.

We start by monitoring the effects of the Programme 101e% run by the Société du Logement de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, which creates unique contemporary works of art on public housing sites to enhance the well-being of tenants and the quality of public spaces. The works are the result of a participatory process and dialogue between the artist, the residents, a site and the public service real estate company.

The experiences are collected in collaboration with community managers and community weavers or persons and entities that are facilitating and/or supporting a local citizen network at neighborhood scale.

livepods.eu – Alessandro - starglide and Katrien - initial concept and project management, complex facilitation & sensemaker, IT solutions

Housing Europe – Clara - initial concept and networking

Creative District - Ruba and Aurelie 

The Cynefin Company – Dave and Anna - sensemaker platform, sensemaking design and support

The project is open indefinitely and sponsored by some of the participating members.

The stories will be available on this page as soon as we have collected about two hundreds of them.

While our Chapter focuses on stories about public art in Brussels, you can join this project in two ways. If you have been to Brussels and were impressed by one of the many works of art you can find across the city, you can share your story. If you are a city and you are interested in the method, or in joining this exercise and extend its scope, the method, the framework and the IT system are available to you too. Just contact us to know more about the conditions.

In addition, the project will be journaled and shared with other local chapters. Journaling may be run as a separate sensemaker exercise.

These are the key stages of the project.
Bold: completed 
Orange: in progress

• create links with interested organizations;
• create links with neighbourhood-level community managers and community weavers;
• explain the methodology to the participating members;
• organise a co-design session to define the questions and the analytical framework;
• set-up the collection platform
• design the choreography of online and offline collection sessions (in progress);
• contact local community leaders to decide the appropriate locations and times to collect stories (in progress);
• collect stories (in progress, some collection sessions completed);
• organise sense-making sessions with i.e. citizens, advocacy organizations and local policy makers.