Projects
Connecting people and places through a simple mobile app interface.
We're currently working with partners on several projects across three key strands - Health and Wellbeing, Community Arts & Culture and Local Knowledge Networks.
How we work, with…
Organisations:
We position ourselves as research partners, not vendors. Our framing: We believe [your sector challenge] lives in community. Lets explore whether revealing relationships opens up new possibilities.
Communities:
We facilitate mapping as inquiry, not extraction. Communities define what matters, who connects, where meaning lives.
Technology:
We designed PLACES as infrastructure, not a product. It's a tool for collaborative discovery, not a transactional service.
Lets’ collaborate…
We work with partners who are willing to learn together, who see communities as collaborators and who believe the most important data might be the data we're not yet capturing.
If you're exploring a specific inquiry (like nature connection and mental health) or curious about revealing relational infrastructure more broadly, we'd be very happy to talk.
Please get in touch.
Extending Nature
As part of the Innovate UK funded Extending Nature project, EcoGPX Ltd and Intercultural Roots are using the PLACES mobile application as a space to create therapeutic nature-connectedness experiences for people experiencing anxiety.
Working with a team of highly experienced and dedicated practitioners. we will seed the application with restorative experiences in audio, video and text, with prompts for participants to connect to their local natural spaces and what is growing around them. Through gentle invitations to engage in relational practices of grounding, noticing, attunement and reflection, the PLACES application will help transform everyday green spaces and pockets of nature into places of reciprocal nourishment and healing.
Press Release: Innovate UK invests in digital solutions for mental health
Neighbourhood Nature
In Neighbourhood Nature, PLACES is being used to document and celebrate community activities in Coventry's parks, rivers, allotments and woodlands. From establishing new pop-up growing areas to ongoing care tor green and blue spaces to nature walks and creative seasonal celebrations. PLACES will be used to share the regeneration and transformation of local places, alongside the cycles of planting, growing and harvest.
Local experts, volunteers and stewards of these precious urban green and blue spaces will share their knowledge and the work they do, encouraging others to participate through the app. Meanwhile, local artists will use PLACES to seed creative responses, in video, audio and image, across the city as gifts for communities to seek out and enjoy, encouraging playful and active engagement with local natural spaces.
EcoGPX Coventry
The Places application was embedded in the EcoGPX Coventry project (2024), run by Intercultural Roots. Here the mobile application was used to creatively document community events and spaces. It marked creative engagements with venues and buildings. bringing those spaces to life through leaving traces of playful activities for regular users and visitors to discover. It was also used by a group of children and young people newly arrived in Coventry in order to mark places or connection tor them in the city, through video and image. The placed media revealed connections to shops, community buildings, restaurants and green and blue spaces across Coventry.
In this way, Places was able to mark in the city spaces of belonging for newly arrived communities, while also offering a 'warm lens' of welcome for those coming to the city.
Project Report: EcoGPX®Launchpad Coventry and Warwickshire / November 2024
Belonging
As part of the Belonging' project, funded by BBC Children in Need, newly arrived children and young people in Coventry are using the Places mobile application as: flexible and accessible digital storytelling tool. Working with local facilitators, the participants will be supported to tell their stories of homing and belonging in Coventry, through video, image and sound. These stories will then be placed on the streets of Hillfields, Coventry and will remain there as a living archive for the whole community to discover.
