From Safe to Seen: Reimagining Public Engagement Through Care and Relational Practice
Researcher Nikita Asnani explores how we can reimagine research impact and evaluation. In this blog she discusses how to achieve this - not through more metrics, but through more meaning.
I’m Nikita Asnani, a design-thinking researcher and public engagement practitioner exploring how we can reimagine research impact and evaluation — not through more metrics, but through more meaning.
This blog is part of my wider project, Reimagining Research Impact: Beyond Metrics and Towards Meaning, and introduces two ideas that have shaped my practice:
- Moving from safety to seen-ness in how we approach equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).
- Using The Cake Index — a reflective framework for relational and behavioural impact, to make that shift real in everyday public engagement work.
From Safe to Seen
Public engagement in higher education often emphasises “safety”, in the form of safe conversations, safe participation, safe environments.
Safety matters. It’s what allows people to enter and begin to trust.
But safety can also become a ceiling. When we focus only on making people comfortable, we risk avoiding the very discomfort that leads to transformation. We create environments where participants are protected, but not visible; included but not recognised; consulted but not co-authors of knowledge.
That’s where the idea of “Seen-ness” comes in (as shown in my visual below).
Safety is about protection.
Seen-ness is about recognition.
The goal of reimagining engagement is to move beyond creating safe spaces towards designing spaces of being seen, where people’s worldviews, languages, and lived experiences shape how knowledge is created and valued.
Seen-ness is a shift from EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) as compliance to EDI as care. It’s what happens when engagement stops being an outreach activity and becomes a reciprocal relationship.
The Cake Index: Measuring What Rises Between Us
So how do we recognise and evaluate these deeper, relational forms of impact?
That’s where the Cake Index comes in, which is a reflective tool I designed to help teams capture the stories, connections, and behavioural shifts that traditional evaluations miss.
The Cake Index uses baking as a metaphor: each layer represents a level of change (individual, relational, systemic).
Rather than asking, “How many attended?”, it asks:
- Who helped bake this?
- Who set the temperature (who held power)?
- Who didn’t get a slice?
- What flavours of change emerged — care, curiosity, solidarity?
- What’s the aftertaste — what lingers once the project ends?
These simple questions create space for reflection that’s honest and humane.
They shift evaluation from extraction (“tell us your story”) to reciprocity (“what did we learn together?”).
From Metrics to Meaning
In a sector shaped by submissions, funding deadlines, and reporting templates, it can feel radical to slow down and listen differently. But slowing down is not inefficiency — it’s integrity.
When we notice relational and behavioural change, we start to see the true depth of impact:
- The student who starts mentoring others after being part of a workshop.
- The community partner who begins designing their own engagement project.
- The researcher who changes how they open meetings or credit collaborators.
These shifts may seem small, but they are signs of transformation.
The Cake Index legitimises these “missing stories” as data — stories as indices of impact.
Why this matters for EDI and engagement
Public engagement practitioners are deeply committed to EDI principles — but often trapped in frameworks that measure diversity without redistributing power.
We count who attends rather than asking who feels seen. We write strategies for inclusion without changing who defines impact.
The Safe → Seen shift helps us go beyond EDI as representation, toward EDI as relationship.
And tools like the Cake Index give us a practical, low-pressure way to reflect on that shift.
By focusing on care and relationality, we begin to reframe engagement not as an extractive transaction, but as an act of co-creation, where knowledge flows in multiple directions.
In summary,
- Every cake has missing ingredients. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s awareness.
- Stories are data. They carry texture, context, and evidence of behaviour change — all legitimate indices of change.
- Bake collectively. Evaluation is participatory design, not passive measurement.
- Share the recipe. Make your methods transparent and co-owned.
- Honour the bakers. Name and credit all contributors, visible or invisible.
So, if you work in public engagement, this is an invitation:
Don’t treat evaluation as an endnote. Treat it as a conversation.
When you next reflect on your work, ask not “What did we deliver?” but “What rose between us?”
Ask whose care held the project together, whose voices shaped the flavour, and who still feels part of it now.
The path from safe to seen is not another EDI checklist; it’s a change in posture.
A move from extraction to reciprocity. From outreach to relationship.
Because impact isn’t just what we produce; it is what we sustain post event-delivery.
Impact rises through care.
Let’s design for seen-ness, not just safety, and bake it into the culture of engagement.
