Designing a calmer space to discuss democracy

Enigma Interactive has partnered with The Open University to design and build i-Attune, a new OpenLearn interactive that invites people to reflect on how they engage with democracy and how everyday conversations can drift toward extreme positions. Now live on OpenLearn, i-Attune turns robust social-psychology research into an accessible, self-guided experience for the public.

Developed with the project’s scientific lead, Professor Kesi Mahendran, i-Attune forms part of OppAttune, the Horizon Europe research programme exploring “everyday extremism” and how to limit the spread of oppositional narratives through attuned social dialogue. The initiative is led by The Open University with partners across Europe.

i-Attune is an interactive self-test that invites people to explore their democratic engagement style and reflect on their own susceptibility to everyday extremism. The experience is deliberately judgement-free, with carefully worded prompts and a neutral interface that avoids leading questions or visual bias. Under the hood, a research-ready backend captures responses with model-aligned precision, supporting ongoing academic analysis.

Working closely with OU researchers, Enigma translated academic frameworks into a neutral, thoughtfully paced user journey that feels more like a guided conversation than a quiz. The team designed a restrained collage visual language, card-sorting interactions and value-based prompts to encourage reflection without nudging responses. Behind the scenes, Enigma engineered a sophisticated data-capture and scoring architecture aligned to the research model, enabling adaptive question paths and meaningful, personalised results.

To support quality assurance and governance across multiple institutions, Enigma delivered a secure soft-launch environment, then production-readied the platform for OpenLearn with accessibility, performance and scalability in mind.

i-Attune shows what can happen when design sensitivity meets academic rigour. Our job was to create an experience that slows people down enough to think, while keeping the research logic intact.

Find out more about how we created the platform.