Trust Through Co-Creation: Exploring Art–Science Interaction Dynamics and Public Engagement in Street-Based Citizen Science Communication
Trust in science is increasingly understood as a relational and practice-based phenomenon that emerges through interaction, participation, and shared meaning-making rather than through one-way communication. In line with this shift, citizen science and participatory science communication have been positioned as promising approaches for fostering trust by involving informal actors in knowledge production. However, important questions remain about how trust is shaped in practice: how it develops through interactional dynamics, how participation is experienced as meaningful or fair, and how different forms of knowledge—scientific, experiential, artistic, and local—are negotiated.
This paper contributes to these debates through an empirical study of the STRAATWIJS project, a co-creative art–science initiative in Amsterdam Nieuw-West that brings together residents, scientists, artists, policy actors, and local initiatives to collaboratively produce and activate street art addressing pressing locally-defined societal issues, rooted in residents’ lived experiences : financial (in)security, housing (in)security and youth wellbeing.
Building on these co-defined themes, STRAATWIJS consists of structured street art co-creation workshops in which participants jointly translate experiences, emotions, and forms of knowledge into visual artworks. Each theme is explored in two facilitated sessions hosted at Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA). In the first session, participants engage in shared sense-making around the theme. They are invited to bring an object, image, or personal artefact that symbolises their relation to the theme, which serves as an entry point for dialogue. Through facilitated group discussion (accompanied by a shared meal), participants collectively develop ideas that are translated into visual concepts and stencils (figures attached).
In the second session, these concepts are transformed into collaborative street art. A professional street artist introduces basic techniques such as spray painting, , after which participants jointly produce a poster using the co-developed stencils. These artworks function not only as outputs but also as mediating objects that crystallise diverse experiences, values, and forms of knowledge (figures attached).
These co-created artworks subsequently become the basis for the final phase of STRAATWIJS, in which they are reintroduced into public space through street-based interaction and performative formats, including interactive street theatre. In this way, the artworks act as boundary objects that connect co-creation processes with wider publics and facilitate dialogue in everyday urban contexts.
The study adopts a qualitative, multi-phase action-research design combining systematic observations of co-creation sessions with semi-structured in-depth interviews. Observations focus on interaction dynamics such as participation patterns, turn-taking, framing and reframing of issues, negotiation of meaning, and decision-making processes during both conceptual and material stages of art production. Attention is given to how different forms of knowledge are made visible, contested, or integrated, and how power relations and participation asymmetries evolve across sessions.
The interview component captures participants’ reflective accounts of collaboration, focusing on perceived trust in other participants (residents, scientists, artists, and local stakeholders), experiences of being heard, perceived fairness of the co-creation process, and the extent to which participation influences their understanding of the societal themes addressed. Interviews also explicitly engage with critical moments observed during workshops, allowing participants to reflect on moments of agreement, tension, or disagreement in the co-creative process.
The analysis is situated within ongoing debates in citizen science and participatory science communication regarding trust as both an enabling condition for participation and a potential outcome of engagement. It conceptualises trust not as a static attitude but as an emergent, interactionally produced phenomenon shaped through aesthetic mediation, embodied collaboration, and the negotiation of diverse epistemic and experiential perspectives.
By focusing on the micro-dynamics of co-creation in structured art–science workshops, this study speaks to the research and practice perspectives of the conference, specifically (but not exclusively) to social dynamics between key stakeholders. Furthermore, it examines the potential of street art as a mediating form that can translate co-created meanings into public-facing dialogue, thereby extending trust formation beyond the immediate group of participants into wider urban communities. Ultimately, the paper argues that co-creative street art practices offer a rich but complex setting for understanding trust in science as a dynamic relational achievement.