Sensory Dice Walk
Creative Ethnographies: Sensory Walks Across Borders
Maruška Svašek developed a playful, dice-driven sensory walking method as part of her ethnographic research and teaching at Queen’s University Belfast. The method has been used across multiple international projects, from Belfast’s peace walls to the streets of Delhi, Prayagraj, Zanzibar, Berkeley, Barcelona, Hanoi, Tokyo, and Beijing, engaging postgraduate and undergraduate students, musicians, artists, journalists, vision impaired people, and elderly community members in creative, embodied exploration of their environments.
Sensory Dice Walk
A game-structured walking method that uses dice, sensory task cards, and creative micro-outputs to encourage critical experimental learning and surface embodied responses from any group in any place.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. It is best suited for any project, programme, or event where you need active participant engagement and feedback but standard forms or interviews feel too formal, too shallow, or too disconnected from the lived experience and groups where mixed backgrounds, power dynamics, or low confidence make direct questioning unreliable.
Primary Objective
To gather detailed participant responses by embedding reflection inside a playful, structured activity. The sensory tasks can be tailored to any evaluation question, whether you want to understand how people experienced a service, a place, a programme, a workshop, or a community event.
Key Stakeholders
Community organisations, arts facilitators, public engagement practitioners, researchers, educators, health and wellbeing projects.
Reflective Planning Questions – Ask Yourself Before You Begin:
- “What specific evaluation question am I trying to answer, and how could I frame it as a sensory or creative task rather than a direct question?”
- “What aspects of my participants’ experience, whether emotional, practical, or social, would a tick-box form miss entirely?”
- “How can I design the task cards so the creative outputs naturally produce materials relevant to what I need to evaluate?”
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Build the Toolkit
Before anyone sets foot outside, you need four things: a dice, a set of sensory task cards, a meeting point, and a rough route with natural decision points (junctions, crossroads, forks). The task cards are the heart of the method. Each one assigns a specific sensory challenge that forces participants to engage with their environment in an unfamiliar way.
The Details:
- Action: Prepare five task cards, each focused on a different sense or creative output. The key is to tailor the prompts to whatever you are evaluating. If you are evaluating a neighbourhood regeneration project, your cards might ask participants to photograph something that has changed and something that hasn’t. If you are evaluating a wellbeing programme, the cards might ask people to find a place on the walk where they feel calm and write three words about why. If you are evaluating an arts festival, participants might sketch the first thing that reminded them of something they saw at the event. If you are evaluating a community service, cards could ask people to walk to a spot that represents how the service made them feel and take a photo. General sensory prompts work too: “Map the smellscape of this street and write five poetic words about it,” “Find the brightest object you can see and translate it into a sound,” “Listen for 60 seconds and sketch the rhythm of what you hear,” “Touch three different surfaces and describe them to your partner as if they were blindfolded,” “Photograph something that feels out of place and write one sentence about why.”
- Tip: Make the cards look and feel like real game cards, not scribbled notes. A little design effort signals to participants that this is play, not homework. Laminate them if you can.
Set the Tone and Form the Groups
Gather everyone at your meeting point. Split participants into small groups of two to four people. Give each group one task card and the dice. Crucially, do not over-explain. Tell them just enough to start: you will walk, you will follow the dice, you will complete the task on your card, and you will add one self-chosen sensory task of your own. That last element, the self-chosen task, gives participants agency and ownership from the very first moment.
The Details:
- Action: Brief participants in under five minutes. Explain the dice rule (even number means turn right, odd means turn left, or any simple binary you prefer). Hand out cards. Ask participants to bring their phones and something to write on. Set a time limit, typically 30 to 60 minutes for the walk itself.
- Tip: Resist the urge to give options for the creative output. Saying “write a poem OR draw OR take photos” invites decision fatigue. Give one clear task per card. A gentle push past the comfort zone produces richer material than a safe menu of choices.
Release and Observe
Let the groups walk independently. Your role is to stay loosely present, not hovering, but visible enough that groups can find you if needed. The dice removes hierarchy: nobody is leading, nobody is following, and the randomness makes everyone a player in a shared game. This is where the method does its deepest work. Participants stop performing and start noticing.
The Details:
- Action: Stay near the route but give groups space. If you spot a group struggling, join briefly and model the task yourself rather than explaining it again. Take your own notes on what you observe: body language, laughter, moments of hesitation, unexpected detours. You may wish to take photographs to visually document the process.
- Tip: The method works indoors too. You can adapt it for a single building, a workshop space, or even a care home. The dice and cards create the game structure regardless of scale. For participants with mobility needs, the “walk” can be a wheelchair route or a seated sensory exploration of objects brought to a table.
Regroup and Harvest
This is where the richest data emerges. Bring everyone back together. Ask groups to share what they created: poems, sketches, photos, sound recordings, single sentences. Let them read aloud, show, and discuss. Then open a facilitated conversation about the experience itself. What did the task make you notice? What surprised you? What would you have missed without it? Record this discussion or take detailed notes. The creative outputs plus the reflective conversation together form your evaluation data.
The Details:
- Action: Allow at least 30 to 60 minutes for the debrief. Ask participants to send you all photos, writing, and recordings before they leave, or photograph everything on the spot. Collect physical cards and any paper outputs.
- Tip: Do not skip the group discussion. The walk generates raw material, but the conversation is where participants articulate meaning. Without it, you have interesting artefacts but no interpretive frame. The debrief is also where participants hear each other’s experiences and build on them, which often surfaces insights no individual would reach alone.
Expand
Depending on the conceptual and organisational framing of the playful walk, ask participants to create collaborative outputs that incorporate a selection of the materials. The aim is to trigger further creative engagement, discussion and interpretation, leading to multimodal outcomes that can be evaluated and presented to a broader audience.
The Details:
- Action: Give clear instructions and decide on a timeline. For example, “In the following three weeks, produce a ten-minute film that incorporates photographs, sketches, poems, and textual reflections related to the playful walk.” Or “During our meeting next week, you will be asked to take two hours to produce a collage based on your drawings and reflective notes.”
- Tips: Build on the existing skills and motivation of the participants. Make sure you find money and time for a celebratory dissemination event where they can share the outcomes of their project with relevant others and stakeholders. If the overall project was set up as a multi-sited project including groups participating in different countries, the dissemination event can take the form of an online symposium where parallel outputs are presented and compared.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Creative Artefact Poems, Sketches, and Photographs |
Participants engaged deeply enough with the sensory environment to produce original creative work. The content of these artefacts reveals what mattered to them emotionally and sensorially, often surfacing themes (fear, belonging, inequality, memory) that direct questioning would not reach. | Physical and digital outputs collected from participants at the end of the walk and during the debrief session. |
| Verbal Group Debrief Conversation |
The facilitated discussion shows whether the method triggered genuine reflection and peer-to-peer exchange. When participants build on each other’s observations, it confirms that the walk created a shared experience worth interpreting together, not just a series of individual tasks. | Audio recording or facilitator notes from the post-walk debrief session. |
| Observational Facilitator Field Notes |
Body language, laughter, hesitation, and spontaneous collaboration observed during the walk itself confirm whether the game structure succeeded in lowering barriers and creating genuine engagement. Resistant or disengaged participants are also visible here, providing honest evidence of the method’s limits. | Facilitator observations recorded during and immediately after the walk. |
| Comparative Cross-Context Variation |
When the same method is used in different locations or with different groups, the variation in outputs proves that participants are responding to their actual environment rather than performing a generic response. This is strong evidence that the method captures context-specific experience. | Comparison of artefacts and debrief themes across multiple sessions or locations. |
Don’t just write a boring report. Use the stuff you actually made during the session.
The Artefact Gallery
Your participants produced poems, photographs, sketches, and sound clips. These are not decorations for a report. They are primary evidence. Arrange a selection of artefacts alongside short excerpts from the debrief conversation that explain what they mean. A photograph of a cracked pavement paired with a participant’s sentence about feeling unsafe says more than a bar chart ever could.
The Context Comparison
If you run the walk more than once, with different groups or in different locations, you have a built-in comparison. The same task cards produce wildly different outputs depending on who is walking and where. This variation is your strongest evidence that the method captures real experience rather than rehearsed feedback.
The Reflection Transcript
The debrief conversation is where participants make sense of their own experience out loud. A five-minute stretch of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is more persuasive than pages of analysis. It shows your funder or stakeholder exactly how participants thought and felt, in their own words.
The Task Card Audit
Your task cards were designed around a specific evaluation question. After the session, lay out every output grouped by card. Patterns will emerge: one card might consistently produce responses about safety, another about belonging, another about confusion. This grouping turns a pile of creative outputs into structured thematic evidence that maps directly back to your evaluation objectives.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Sensory Dice Walk, participants in our community felt playful and unguarded enough to reveal what they truly noticed, feared, and valued about their environment.”