Making rooms speak

This working paper from Associazione Culturale Eutopia documents the method developed to run the WANT focus groups within WWM, We Want More, a Creative Europe cooperation project (grant agreement no. 101173561) on the inclusion and representation of disabled artists and audiences in the performing arts. Five focus groups took place in Mérida (February 2025), Lisbon (September 2025), Cattolica (February 2026), Belgrade (June 2026) and Athens (October 2026). Each one was redesigned on the limits declared by the previous one. The paper describes what each event did, what emerged from the room and which choices it forced. It then sets out the resulting model: the work before the day, the day itself and the close-out after it. Two principles emerged in practice: talking with people rather than to them, and treating accessibility as the floor, not the ceiling. The paper presents two tools. The WWM Canvas is a structured sheet that takes each group from a challenge to a ten-word solution. The body matrix is a venue audit instrument that scores what eight different bodies can do in each room. Results draw on the critical friend’s notes across the five events and on participant surveys from the last three. The paper also states its limits. The format can be written down, but the matching of people to roles and the coordination that holds them together do not transfer through a document.