Our mission
We strive to make public participation more inclusive by engaging people where they are. With Citizen Dialog Kit, our goal is to create easy to deploy, yet highly effective new forms of civic engagement. We situate the interaction in the urban environment, the classical agora where people encounter one another and public life takes place.
By making participation local, contextual and situated, we aim to provide totally unique insights. With those insights, we support the creation of liveable and dynamic places for all people.
MEET THE TEAM
Bringing cutting-edge technology to citizen engagement
Jef Van den broeck
Co-founder and CTO
Jef comes from an embedded software background and runs his own tiny IoT/prototyping studio. He likes nature and digital rights, and secretly misses modem sounds. He thinks you should press “save” more often.
Jorgos Coenen
Co-founder and CEO
Jorgos holds a PhD based on the research that formed the basis of Citizen Dialog Kit. He is passionate about creating a smooth user experience, start to end. Find him in a movie theater when there’s time in his schedule.
Ennio Pillecyn
Co-founder and COO
Ennio is a student and entrepreneur. He combines CDK with a master in Computer Science as well as a consultancy company, TSGP, he founded in 2021. Loves to optimise and standardise.
Paul Biedermann
Participation designer
Paul is responsible for our clients from the DACH countries, while he is finalising his PhD in Urban Interaction Design. If he’s not working or studying, he spends his time overlanding or hitchhiking on his mission to visit as many places as possible.
Our advisors
Sandy Claes
Co-founder and Professor at KU Leuven & LUCA Arts
Sandy is a lecturer and researcher at LUCA school of Arts, and is a Professor at KU Leuven. Before, she led the research and innovation department of the Flemish public broadcaster (VRT). Her PhD research focused on the engagement of citizens with urban data through public visualisations. Her research interests include participatory design methods, interactive storytelling and information design.
Andrew Vande Moere
Co-founder and Professor at KU Leuven
Andrew is a Professor at KU Leuven, where he does research in Design Informatics, i.e. the application of design-oriented methodologies towards building interactive systems that augment human-data interactions in value-aware and reflective ways. Andrew combines expertise on emerging technologies, with an interest in (open) data, public displays & urban interfaces, data visualisation and civic engagement.
History and origins
How it all started.
The concept behind Citizen Dialog Kit (CDK) originates from the Research[x]Design lab of KU Leuven’s Department of Architecture. For over a decade and in the context of multiple PhD’s, the lab developed its unique expertise regarding “Urban Interaction Design”, or the design of interactive experiences with information in urban spaces.
Initially focused on visualising open data in relevant physical spaces (”urban data visualisation”), the first version of what would later become Citizen Dialog Kit was designed as an experiment in the Horizon Europe OrganiCity project. At that point, in 2017, our goal was to create a way to engage citizens about issues such as air quality through open data. Many tools existed to collect data, but none to easily and publicly visualise it in the physical location it was captured.
A year later, a second OrganiCity project enabled us to create the first version of CDK. It already included an e-paper screen, Internet-of-Things networking, and integrated push buttons for intuitive interaction.
We slowly iterated on the design and functionality. Experimenting with larger screen formats, different button layouts and interaction modalities through various short-term projects.
These experiments revealed again and again that something was missing in the citizen engagement tool kit.
As interest continued to build over the years, we started an intensive two year project with the energy efficient IoT experts at the DistriNet lab (KU Leuven Computer Science) to create a robust foundation for CDK.
This put us on the path toward launching the spin-off.
