Lab
Public Hearing Lab
A structured listening system for understanding work, value, and self-worth before they are flattened into surveys, KPIs, or organisational narratives.
Institutional Problem
The Public Hearing Lab develops methods from Voice to Voice for listening to how people experience work, AI, institutions, change, and the future.
Research Focus
The Public Hearing Lab begins from Voice to Voice and develops its listening structures into a methodology.
Many institutions rely on surveys, engagement scores, KPIs, and dashboards to understand people. These tools can be useful, but they often miss the deeper layers of experience: shame, pride, exhaustion, fear, dignity, resentment, hope, and the feeling of being replaceable.
Voice to Voice showed that work is not only an economic activity. It is a site where external value and internal self-worth meet. Income, status, stability, recognition, autonomy, usefulness, and meaning are constantly negotiated in people’s lives.
The lab develops structured ways to listen before decisions harden into strategy, policy, restructuring, code, or institutional procedure. Through deep interviews, narrative listening, spatial presentation, archetypes, and tension maps, it translates lived experience into forms that institutions and publics can reflect on without reducing those experiences to simple scores.
Formats
- Work-value-self-worth triangle
- Deep interviews
- Narrative listening
- Listening space
- Archetypes
- Tension maps
- Emotional and narrative complexity
- Audience and stakeholder witnessing
- Listening before deciding
Possible Contexts
- Future of work
- AI adoption
- Automation and restructuring
- Public service transformation
- Care work and emotional labour
- Youth and precarious work
- Organisational culture
- Mental health and burnout
- Public policy and civic listening