Empowering Citizens for Democratic Innovation
The Democracy Labs Toolkit
About the Democracy Labs Toolkit
The Democracy Labs Toolkit helps facilitators run a structured, participatory co-creation process to explore citizens’ experiences of democratic participation and develop concrete democratic innovation proposals.
The toolkit brings together practical resources that support each stage of the Democracy Labs. It includes the Welcoming booklets for sensitising, templates for sensemaking and co-creation, provotyping and futuring materials, and facilitation guidance presented on the website to support workshop delivery. Together, these tools help diverse groups share experiences, generate ideas, and design concrete democratic innovations. A step by step description of the process is available on the How to Use the Toolkit page.
Toolkit Design
The Democracy Labs Toolkit was designed as a practical, reusable set of materials that translates the Democracy Labs approach into workshop-ready templates, prompts, and facilitation guidance.
The materials are organised around four connected stages: sensitising, sensemaking, provotyping, and futuring, so that participants can move from personal experiences to shared interpretation, critical reflection, and the development of concrete democratic innovation proposals.
The toolkit includes reflection prompts and templates that help participants surface lived experiences, identify recurring patterns and tensions, challenge assumptions through a provocative case, and translate emerging ideas into tangible concepts and short scenarios. This design supports perspective-sharing and collective creativity while keeping the outputs actionable and grounded in democratic principles.
Target Audience
The toolkit is designed for facilitators and organisations who want to run participatory co-creation workshops on democratic participation and democratic innovations. Researchers seeking insight into citizens’ experiences, public sector teams and municipalities, and civil-society or community organisations can use the toolkit to structure inclusive dialogue and generate actionable ideas.
The process can be adapted to different contexts and participant groups. The materials are designed to be practical and adaptable, so the toolkit can be adjusted to different contexts while keeping the same overall flow.
Democracy Labs Toolkit in Use
The Democracy Labs Toolkit has been used by students to design and facilitate a participatory workshop. Rather than following a fixed script, the Toolkit was adapted to the group, supporting discussion and reflection from lived experiences toward shared values and future-oriented scenarios. This example illustrates how the Toolkit enables flexible facilitation and context-specific use, allowing participants to shape the process and outcomes.