Fabby - Live Launch

On August 22, 2025, the AI-based dialogue character Fabby was introduced for the first time at an open-air event on the grounds of the project partner Gut Einern in. The event was conceived and realized by the Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP) together with onto[story] and additional project partners. Fabby was designed to make the complex topic of circular economy accessible, emotional, and interactive.
The event was part of the FAB-Region Bergisches Land, a regional initiative within the international FAB City movement which supports cities and regions on toward resource-neutral circular systems. In the cities of Wuppertal, Solingen, and Remscheid, new approaches to circular innovation and dialogic, everyday knowledge transfer are being tested. The venue, Gut Einern, is a historic agricultural estate that now serves as an open space for education, culture, and sustainability projects.
The idea was to bring Fabby out of the digital development environment into a real-world setting and to turn circular economy into a dialogic experience. The open-air premiere functioned as a living lab: instead of explaining Fabby, visitors interacted with her directly for the first time. The event explored how AI-driven knowledge transfer can work in an event context—low-threshold, personal, and free of technical barriers.
Visitors could interact with Fabby via QR codes on their smartphones, connecting to a WhatsApp chat, or through fixed audio interaction points across the site. Fabby responded in real time, adapting her communication style to each user. This made her perceivable not as an app, but as a present, conversational personality.
The event combined technology, storytelling, and spatial staging to create a new format for sustainability communication. Fabby, conceived as a “Techyonion,” uses layered storytelling to guide users from emotional entry points to deeper, expert-level knowledge, always in an empathetic, encouraging tone.
The introduction marked the starting point for Fabby’s operational use. Today, she is a dialogic bot on the website, with further applications planned for workshops, festivals, and hybrid learning formats. The event thus became not only a product launch, but a prototype for a scalable, dialogic AI experience with impact beyond the event itself.