Can a Group Chat Be a Democratic Space? Inside Larpocracy's ZAP LAB
Most of us think of WhatsApp as somewhere to coordinate dinner plans or forward messages to family. Larpocracy's ZAP LAB asked a more unusual question: could the same everyday platform become a space for creativity, intimacy, and democratic participation between strangers?
ZAP LAB is a WhatsApp-based design laboratory adapted and developed further within Larpocracy's Work Package 4, led by ZU-UK. The premise is simple and deliberately low-barrier. WhatsApp is everywhere in Brazil, and it asks nothing new of participants: no additional app to download, no account to create, no unfamiliar interface to learn. That accessibility is the point. By meeting people on a platform they already use and trust, ZAP LAB lowers the threshold to taking part.
Over five days, participants received a daily creative prompt: a small task to complete and share with the group. But the design contained a quiet twist: having completed a task set by someone else, each participant was then invited to author a new task for the others. In other words, participants moved from following instructions to designing them. This shift (from receiving guidance to giving it) sits at the centre of what WP4 has come to call "instructional competence": the capacity to design and facilitate participation for other people. Our emerging findings suggest this is a skill worth taking seriously as a democratic one.
The first run of ZAP LAB drew strong engagement: 100 sign-ups, with 65 people actively participating across the five days, including more than fifteen participants from marginalised groups. Recruitment was focused in Belém do Pará, in connection with the Federal University of Pará, ahead of the DRIFT residency and COP30. Participants described feelings of connection, curiosity, and a kind of emotional exposure in their exchanges with strangers, the sense of something genuinely shared, formed at a distance.
That last point matters for the wider project. Much of the debate about democracy online centres on how social media platforms tend to amplify conflict, performance, and polarisation. ZAP LAB offers a counterpoint: evidence that digital tools, thoughtfully designed, can instead cultivate intimacy, attentiveness, and connection across distance and cultural difference. It suggests that online spaces beyond conventional social media can host conversations that are at once personal and political.
ZAP LAB is also a model for reach. One of the persistent limits of in-person participatory art is that it touches relatively few people at a time. By extending intimate, in-person collaboration into a hybrid online form, ZAP LAB points to how this kind of work can maintain its depth while reaching greater numbers and a wider geographic spread than face-to-face experiences usually allow.
The model is now feeding into the rest of Larpocracy. At the project's pan-project symposium in Kraków in May 2026, the WP4 team (University of Greenwich) ran a ZAP LAB workshop inviting partners from other work packages to test its design and propose how it might be redesigned for the second half of the project. Those conversations have already generated collaborative proposals for designing online spaces that support inclusive participant communities: exactly the kind of cross-pollination Larpocracy was built to produce.