Situated Listening
DRIFT Lagan
DRIFT was a floating pavilion on Belfast’s River Lagan, commissioned by Belfast 2024 as part of a city-wide programme of creative projects. A collaboration between OGU Architects, MMAS, and sonic artist Matilde Meireles, it used architecture, sound, and curated public events to reopen public conversation about the city’s relationship with its waterway. The pavilion operated at two sites — Stranmillis Weir and Waterfront Hall — between August and September 2024.
Situated Listening
A method for revealing what communities truly feel about a place — by putting them inside it, making the invisible perceptible, and letting honest response emerge without a questionnaire in sight.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. Situated Listening is best suited for projects where a place has become invisible or taken for granted by its community and where standard surveys would flatten the complexity of people’s felt relationship with their environment. It works across urban waterways, public parks, heritage sites, decommissioned buildings, and any setting where geography shapes identity but that connection has eroded or gone unexamined.
Primary Objective
To surface authentic, affective responses to a place that participants would not easily articulate in a survey or focus group — and to generate qualitative and observational evidence that shows what changed in how people relate to their environment.
Key Stakeholders
Local communities and residents; environmental or heritage organisations; public bodies responsible for the place; artists, architects, or designers as collaborators; funders requiring evidence of public engagement and attitude shift.
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Map the Place Before You Touch It
Before any activity is designed or any participants are invited, spend time in the site as a researcher. Document not what it looks like but what it feels like — its sounds, its rhythms, its smells, the way people currently move through or past it. You are building a sensory baseline that will anchor everything that follows.
The Details:
- Action: Visit the site at different times of day and in different conditions. Take field notes, audio recordings, sketches, or photographs that capture sensory qualities rather than just visual ones. Note who is already there, who is absent, and what barriers — physical, social, or historical — might explain that absence.
- Tip: Resist the urge to decide what the “problem” is before you have spent time listening. The site will often tell you something your desktop research missed. Look for points where human infrastructure meets natural or ecological systems — these are usually where the richest tensions live.
Design the Encounter, Not the Message
Your job is to create the conditions for honest response — not to steer people toward a particular feeling. Design a structure, installation, or curated experience that makes participants notice the place differently: heightening one sense, removing a familiar barrier, or simply granting access that did not previously exist. The encounter does the evaluation work; you do not need to explain it.
The Details:
- Action: Identify the single most important perceptual shift you want participants to experience. Is it being physically closer to something they usually observe from a distance? Hearing something they normally cannot? Seeing the place from an unfamiliar angle or elevation? Design the simplest possible structure or experience that delivers that shift — then stop adding.
- Tip: Use materials that carry sensory meaning in themselves: textures that invite touch, materials that respond to wind or water, colours borrowed from the natural palette of the site. The physical encounter should feel inevitable, not imposed. Avoid interpretation panels and explanatory text — let the place speak first.
Hold Open Time and Curated Time Separately
Run two distinct modes alongside each other. In open time, your installation or encounter is available to anyone, unprogrammed and unguided — people arrive on their own terms and inhabit the space freely. In curated time, you invite specific audiences to structured events that deepen engagement: expert talks, participatory workshops, performances, or guided experiences. Both modes generate different and equally valuable evidence.
The Details:
- Action: Plan your calendar so that open sessions form the majority of your programme — resist the temptation to over-programme. Curated events should serve distinct purposes: bringing in specialist knowledge, reaching communities who would not self-select into an open encounter, and generating richer conversation that can be captured and documented.
- Tip: The most revealing evaluation data often comes from what people do and say during unprogrammed time, when no one is watching or prompting them. Station an observer — not a surveyor — during open sessions. Note behaviours, overheard comments, how long people stay, what draws them back, and who they bring with them on a second visit.
Capture Response in the Moment and in Multiple Forms
Do not rely on post-event surveys. The most honest responses emerge during the experience itself, and they are rarely verbal. Capture them through observation, through invitations to draw or record, through structured conversation at the end of curated events, and through the traces participants leave in the space — sketches, written notes, objects, photographs.
The Details:
- Action: Build at least two non-verbal capture methods into your design: for example, provide drawing materials during a listening session, or invite participants to mark a map with words or symbols. Use audio recording with consent during any facilitated conversation. Photograph the space with people in it — not the empty installation — to show evidence of inhabitation and engagement.
- Tip: Keep any verbal prompts short and open. The most productive question you can ask is almost always the simplest: “What surprised you?” or “What did you notice that you had not noticed before?” Long questionnaires administered immediately after an immersive experience actively undermine the response you are trying to capture.
Surface, Share, and Keep It Moving
Your evaluation does not end when the installation closes. Compile what you gathered — observations, participant responses, expert contributions, media coverage, and your own team’s reflective notes — into a clear account of what changed, for whom, and why you believe the encounter was responsible. Then share it in a form that travels beyond the project.
The Details:
- Action: Write a short reflective report that includes at least one specific story of changed perception alongside your broader quantitative data (attendance, event numbers, media reach). Share findings publicly — through an open access document, a public event, or a sector publication — so that the learning reaches practitioners beyond your immediate network.
- Tip: The most powerful outcome of Situated Listening is not the data you collect during the project — it is the ongoing conversation it starts. Ask yourself: who needs to hear what we found? Which decision-makers, planners, or funders would act differently if they knew this? Then get the findings in front of those people directly, not just in a project report.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Observational Behavioural Field Notes |
That participants’ relationship with the place changed during the encounter — evidenced through dwell time, return visits, spontaneous conversation, and the bringing of others. Behaviour is harder to fake than a survey score. | Facilitator and observer field notes taken during open public sessions; photographic documentation of the installation with participants present. |
| Qualitative In-the-Moment Participant Response |
That the encounter generated authentic, unsolicited emotional and intellectual responses that go beyond what a post-event survey would capture — including surprise, changed perception, and expressed intention to act or advocate. | Overheard and recorded participant comments during curated events; written and drawn responses gathered during sessions; closing verbal prompts at the end of facilitated events. |
| Critical Review Independent Expert Commentary |
That the encounter was perceived by informed external observers as producing genuine public benefit and changed relationship with place — providing third-party corroboration of impact claims that the project team cannot make about itself. | Published reviews, press coverage, sector journal articles, and award assessments from independent commentators with relevant expertise in architecture, ecology, or public engagement. |
| Longitudinal Sustained Stakeholder Investment |
That the impact outlasted the project itself — evidenced by partner organisations continuing the work, funders recommissioning, participants becoming ongoing advocates, or the physical installation returning to a site by public demand. | Partner communications and continued collaboration post-project; documented plans for future iterations; attendance at follow-on events by participants from the original programme. |
Don’t just write a boring report. Use the rich, multi-form evidence you gathered during the encounter itself.
The Behaviour Map
Your field notes contain a record of how people actually moved through, inhabited, and returned to the space. This is stronger evidence of engagement than attendance numbers alone. Patterns of behaviour — where people paused, what they touched, how long they stayed, whether they came back — tell a story that no survey can.
The Unexpected Response
The most persuasive evidence in any report about place-based work is a specific, unsolicited, honest response from a participant who was not expecting to be affected. These comments — gathered in the moment, not on a post-event survey — carry a credibility that pre-designed metrics cannot replicate.
The Continuity Signal
Situated Listening generates lasting communities of interest — people who return, who advocate, who bring others, who ask what comes next. This is the evidence that your project produced sustained rather than momentary engagement, and it is exactly what funders and policymakers need to see when making decisions about longer-term investment.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Situated Listening, participants in our community felt curious and implicated enough to start claiming the place as theirs and asking what should happen to it next.”