The INCITE-DEM Dialogue Tool is aims to boost user engagement and facilitate decision-making in community contexts. Our priority was to design a robust tool that would ensure functionality across various community settings. Our goal is to enable a wide range of meaningful conversations through user-friendly interactions. The intuitive and visually appealing interface enhances user experience and allows for playful interactions that encourage increased participation and simplify decision-making processes within communities.

Starting with the existing HUMAT agent-based simulation model (i.e., developed in project SMARTEES), this task builds an interface for the Dialogue Tool that (1) offers a script to translate the interests and motivations of citizens into personal agents (i.e., “avatars”) in a simulation of their community case, and that enables (2) generating scenarios of the social dynamics in the project, where citizens can observe the process of how the different simulated agents are interacting, and understand the outcomes for different (groups of) citizens, including themselves. 

Input schemes allow for translating a person’s interests and values into the corresponding agent’s characteristics. Colour schemes are used to create a simple intuitive interface to provide feedback on the simulated social process. The simplicity of use is a key point in developing an interface for the Dialogue Tool to make it inclusive for a broad public. 

The simulation produces scenarios in which individuals can identify the developments of their “own” avatar, in particular vulnerable actors that are often less heard in community discussions. This requires the development of output graphs and schemes to provide citizens with a clear overview of simulated group dynamics, opinion change over time, including convergence/polarisation, and agents’ need satisfaction.