A Visual Backbone for Belgium’s Largest Citizen Dialogue on Health & Care

Client

WhoCares? / Christelijke Mutualiteit
Sector

Health Care
Theme driver

Community, Participation, Visals

Related services

Citizens have a lot to say about how we can build a healthier, more caring system and the Caruna Zorgtop set out to make those voices count. Together with Whocares and CM, Christelijke Mutualiteit hosted Belgium’s largest citizen dialogue on health and care, bringing 100 discussion tables across 13 themes into one participatory summit. Our role was to create a visual backbone that could hold that scale: a live harvesting system that captured ideas in real time and turned hundreds of contributions into clear, shareable visual insights for the next steps.

The Challenge

Belgium’s largest health insurance organisation, the Christelijke Mutualiteit, launched a bottom-up process inviting citizens to co-create ideas for a healthier care system. Our partners at WhoCares? asked us to design a visual harvesting system that could support this large-scale participatory summit:

Harvest key insights from 100 discussion tables around 13 themes in real time
This wasn’t just about creating visuals — it was about building a visual architecture that could hold hundreds of voices and make emerging insights visible.

The approach

We co-created a complete, multi-layered visual setup tailored to the flow of the day.

1. Five thematic towers

We created five large towers, covering the 13 discussion themes. Each tower featured pre-printed illustrations and titles, helping participants easily navigate the content areas and anchor their discussions.

2. Idea and quote cards at every table

Every table received a stack of simple, structured cards to capture key ideas, insights, and quotes.
This allowed participants to express contributions clearly and consistently.

3. A runner system to keep content moving

A team of runners circulated throughout the day, collecting the cards and bringing them to the harvesting area — ensuring a continuous inflow of fresh content.

4. Real-time synthesis into visual harvests

In the harvesting zone, our team processed the incoming ideas, clustered them, and transformed them into 13 clear visual harvests!

5. A calm, creative corner: paint-by-numbers mural

To reflect the summit’s focus on care and well-being, we added a participatory paint-by-numbers wall. Participants could colour together during breaks — a gentle, de-stimulating activity especially valued by more introverted attendees.

Mara Callart doing Visual Harvesting on the Caruna Health Summit

The Result

The summit benefited from a strong visual backbone that:

supported the participatory process,
made collective thinking visible,
and turned a large volume of citizen input into clear, shareable visuals.

After the event, the organisers received 15 synthesised visual harvests, providing a rich and accessible overview of all discussions — ready to be shared, analysed, and used in the next steps of the citizen engagement process.

“Mara provided visual support for Caruna, a large-scale participatory project exploring how we as a society envision the future of healthcare. Both the visual aids for dialogue, the “color by numbers” and the visual harvesting around the 13 themes at the event itself were a huge success. Thank you so much!”

Stef Steyaert WhoCares?